The Journal of Environment & Development

Using the latest forest inventory, this article provides a detailed analysis of China's changing forest sector by focusing on new forest trends, forest policy changes, and challenges to achieving a sustainable forest management. The authors analyze the dynamics of forest resources and provide an impact assessment of forest policies on China's forestry development during the past decades. Moreover, the analysis of the forest market highlights substantial disequilibria marked by a limited domestic supply potential and a growing demand for forest products satisfied by increasing imports. Internal and external solutions are explored, and their implications for China and supplying countries are assessed.

This article investigates if higher levels of social capital, better governance structures, and a more ambitious conservation policy are positively linked to the ability of states to address biodiversity loss. Serving this purpose is a data set containing estimates of woodpecker diversity in 20 European countries. These data are argued to be a more valid indicator of biodiversity than most other available cross-national measures of environmental quality. A seemingly unrelated regression analysis reveals that none of the indicators are linked to higher levels of woodpecker diversity, which in turn leads to the conclusion that present institutions, environmental policies, and social structures have negligible effects on biodiversity compared to long-term landscape transformations.

This article analyzes the effects of the invasion of water hyacinth on fishing in Lake Victoria. The authors built two fairly standard Schaefer-type models that have one innovation: They allow the water hyacinth abundance to affect catchability. The authors estimated static and dynamic catch per unit of effort functions for Lake Victoria fisheries, investigating the trend in the lake's stocks during the period 1983 to 2000 and focusing particularly on the effect of the water hyacinth on fish stocks and on catchability coefficients. The results show that although fish stocks have fallen since 1990, this decline appears to have been at least temporarily halted by the declining catchability of fish because of the growing abundance of water hyacinth. The impact of the hyacinth on the catchability of fish was greatest in the Kenyan section of Lake Victoria. Although hyacinth has many negative effects, it effectively hinders fishing and thereby paradoxically stops or at least postpones serious overfishing.

Norway has long tried to portray itself as one of the most environmentally responsible states. But it has consistently refused to support the moratorium against commercial whaling. This article offers a cultural explanation for this seeming contradiction, by examining the way the global antiwhaling movement framed the issue and the Norwegian environmental organizations reframed it. It argues that two cultural differences are relevant. First, animal-rights organizations were an important part of the U.S. antiwhaling coalition, whereas such organizations are largely excluded from the Norwegian environmental activist community, where animal rights arguments have found little traction. Secondly, U.S. nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) operate in an adversarial pluralistic political culture, whereas the Norwegian environmental movement is embedded in a corporatist system where consensual decision making is the norm and has fostered a close relationship with the state. This has led to different images and strategic considerations being used by NGOs to frame the issue and ultimately to different decisions on the need for a moratorium.