David Lopez-Carr will return to Guatemala in summer 2018 to collaborate with Planetary Health Center of Expertise (PH COE) seed grantees to build on the last two decades of López-Carr’s previous work in the region, conducting a third round of household surveys investigating the drivers of migration, maternal and child health outcomes, food security, land use, and deforestation in the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR), Petén.
The largest and most northern region of Guatemala, Petén is the heart of one of the tri-national Maya Forest, the largest remaining intact lowland tropical forest in Central America. For the past 50 years, Central America has experienced a disproportionate amount of deforestation compared to South America, Asia, and Africa, leading researchers to try to understand the dynamics between land-use change and socio-economic and biophysical factors. The out-migration of subsistence farming families from surrounding rural regions to the rainforest frontier is recognized as a primary driver of land-use change through agricultural expansion.
According to López-Carr, deforestation and land-use change account for 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions, a figure larger than the entire transportation sector. “By thoroughly understanding what makes communities vulnerable to displacement or relocation, we will reconcile agricultural needs with conservation efforts to address the perverse economic incentives driving deforestation,” said López-Carr.
With funding from the National Geographic Committee for Research and Exploration and PH COE seed grant collaborator, Aracely Martínez, Director of Sustainable Development at the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala and her colleague, Anthropologist Felipe Girón, UCSD post-doc Daniel Ervin, and López-Carr are ready to begin data collection this summer.
Once complete, the project will be the only investigation in Latin America, and one of the few in the world, to include three datasets from the same communities in a remote forest frontier, taken over a period of multiple decades. The goal of the project is to produce data on land-use change and to evaluate drivers of deforestation as well as subsequent migration, and family food security.
“Most studies rely on cross-sectional data, explore a limited number of independent variables and are lacking in quantitative aspects,” explained Martinez. Thanks to the maternal and child health, livelihoods, and family planning interventions by the Guatemalan NGO WINGS starting in 2000this project has a rare opportunity to apply the Before-After Control Impact design (BACI) by following the same households over time from 1998, 2008, and 2018.
BACI is the most effective design for impact assessment, allowing researchers to evaluate relative changes in the same population over time following a controlled intervention. By gaining a better understanding of frontier household life cycles, frontier development and land transitions, López-Carr, Ervin, and Martínez, and Girón hope to identify how maternal and child health, nutrition and infectious disease relate to the health of local people and their ecosystems.