Alexandre Rivas

The Potential Impacts of Global Climatic Changes and Dams on Amazonian Fish and Their Fisheries

The Amazon River Basin, which encompasses the world’s largest remaining tropical rain‐ forest, has the highest diversity of fish species of any region in the world [1]. Some of these species represent highly abundant fish stocks that have supported an important fishery for many decades, or many centuries if the history prior to European coloniza‐ tion is included. The importance of fishing in the Amazon River Basin can easily be ob‐ served from the high fish consumption, which is mainly attributed to people who live in rural areas near rivers and lakes (Table 1). Regardless of this importance for food, there is no integrative strategy for fishery management, and the activity in this basin as a whole is highly vulnerable to externalities, including those resulting from environmental changes and man-made interventions.

Indigenous people and sustainable development in Amazonas

SUMMARY Indigenous populations have lived for many generations in a sustainable fashion, developing knowledge about how to live in harmony with the environment. However, the sustainability of their life styles, their quality of life and the maintenance of intact ecosystems are threatened by a series of changes, including incorporation into the general fabric of society, conflict with non-indigenous migrants, expansion of indigenous populations and the globalization of national economies. This paper looks at the potential for policy to deal with these issues. In particular, it is shown that the ‘polluter pays principle’ is not appropriate for indigenous societies. The paper recommends a set of policies and shows how international cooperation in the areas of monitoring and enforcement, augmentation of demand for rain forest products and eco-certification can help indigenous groups improve their quality of life and maintain ecosystems in their current undisturbed state.

Information and the subsistence farmer's decision to deforest in Latin America

This paper investigates the role that information plays in the decision by subsistence farmers to deforest, and generates a body of evidence from three Latin American studies demonstrating that information about agricultural techniques and general agricultural education are important to tropical land-use decisions. Based on a growing body of literature, inadequately defined property rights clearly play a central role as a potential source of excessive deforestation. While property rights are important, the implementation and enforcement of property rights will not in itself resolve the deforestation problem, if informational market failures are present. We hypothesise that long-time forest residents have more knowledge about sustainable uses of the forest (compared with recent migrants from non-rainforest areas), and that the regions where the long-time residents reside experience less deforestation, independent of property rights. We conclude with a discussion of the results.

The Sustainable Economic Development of Traditional Peoples

It is argued that mainstream economics, with its present methodological approach, is limited in its ability to analyze and develop adequate public policy to deal with current environmental problems and sustainable development. This book provides an alternative approach. Building on the strengths and insights of Post Keynesian and ecological economics and incorporating cutting edge work in such areas as economic complexity, bounded rationality and socio-economic dynamics, the contributors to this book provide a trans-disciplinary approach to deal with a broad range of environmental concerns.