 Good afternoon. Welcome to our session on migration in forests, people in motion, landscapes and transition. Bimbika wanted to get a distinguished speaker to open our session today and unfortunately none were available so I'm volunteered to step in and help out with the talk today. Yes, to appear distinguished. I've got glasses. I'm going to be doing two things today. I'm going to go review a few of the issues that underlie this program and this series of projects that we've developed over the past two or three years. I'm then going to review a case from Peru that shows how we're dealing with some of these issues in this research. So I'll get started. And then afterwards, given the theme on migration, we're going to have everyone move from a migrator on the room to different positions so we'll be doing a World Café format which I think will be appropriate after lunch because it will wake people up but it also stays with our idea of migration, getting people to move around the room. We'll be right in tune. So first of all, our research deals with this issue of how does our research or how do we engage with the scholarship and forestry around the agenda 2030 on sustainable development. There are key elements of the current transition in forest landscapes that enhance mobility. It's easier for people to move around. There's transportation corridors, technology that allows people to move around that has changed, we think, the way migration is affecting the world we live in. But also there's the issues of population and community change that is in both the sending areas and receiving areas. So understanding what is happening in places that you have low population decreasing as people move out but other areas where you have people moving into and what are those dynamics. And then finally looking at the varied impact of remittances, incomes and investments. So as people move to different areas for different economic drivers what happens with the people that are left behind and the way they interact with the funds that are coming in. So while forest policy research and trends assume that first of all households and communities are static and spatially bound. So that's generally an assumption, a lot of the work that is done. And the issues of migration, mobility and remittances are seen as outside the attention of natural resource policy makers. So these are seen as sort of externalities or complications in the development of programs or in research that's being done. And migration is perceived either as disruptive that migrants are the problem or it's a sign of livelihoods failure. So migration is dealt with simply because it's a strategy adapted by people that are failing wherever they had been. And so the expected policy solutions attempt to keep people from moving. It's focused on trying to stop migration rather than understand why it's taking place. So in the agenda 2030 on sustainable development, migration and remittances targets are included in particularly in goal 10. I'm not going to read through these but they're dealt with in a very passing way. The critiques of the way this is dealt with is that migration only focuses on international migration. It emphasizes the management of migration rather than either dealing with or taking advantage of these migratory flows. And it reflects glowing anxiety in Europe and North America over the migration crisis. So it's responding very much to the agenda set by policy makers in those parts of the world. And there's a lack of attention to the tensions and trade-offs between managed migration, inequality, and environmental sustainability. So these topics just aren't dealt with enough, we believe. So in our program on migration for us, people in motion, landscapes, and transition, we seek to address these gaps in current scholarship and policies through comparative research to document and understand who is moving, where are they moving, how are they moving, and what patterns does this produce, why are they adopting the strategies they do, and how do these trends affect land use decisions, livelihoods, other strategies, social dynamics, gender roles, and forest management. So in a broad sense, that's what this suite of projects is dealing with, each project in a bit different focus and in different parts of the world. I'm going to focus specifically on a case of some of this research funded by the German BMZ in the Peruvian Amazon. And it addresses this key question. Migration is seen as a key driver of deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon, and you often see it cited. The government will often release documents that say things like 90% of the deforestation in the Amazon is caused by migratory agriculture. But they're always quite vague about what they mean. First of all, migratory agriculture could be swidden agriculture, it could be migration, but they're not specific about where they get this information. And we, in a past study we did, we looked into this, the origin of these figures of the 90% figure, and actually rather than measures of deforestation, it was just the frequency of deforestation events. So they found that 90% of instances of deforestation were less than one hectare. And from that, then they extrapolate that to be migratory agriculture, even though they have almost no information in that study on who's doing the deforestation or why. And they don't try to identify where that deforestation is taking place. So there's a lack of systematic information about migration, the characteristics of migrants, or the actual effect of migration on forests. And there's an underlying narrative that emphasizes that migration is primarily the shift of population out of the Andes into the Amazon. And there's an implicit racism in this that is a view among policymakers in Lima that it's the poor indigenous people from the highlands moving in and causing deforestation and destruction in the Amazon. Although it's rarely couched in those terms as you talk to people or you see how it's presented, you can see that bias very evident in their work. So in our project, we're looking at four different multi-village landscape sites that are based in the central Amazon in Peru, around the city of Pucalpa, which is the capital of Ucayali. And these landscapes are Nishuya, which we're calling Nishuya, it's not actually the name of the place. Which had been a production forest in the 1980s that was invaded by forest workers who settled there to begin growing coca. So during the 80s, this was actually a no-go zone for the government because it was primarily controlled by the drug trade and narcotraficantes that didn't allow other people to move into this area. Another one of the landscapes is the Abohaushesha, which is a traditional riverine settlement area. These are areas that have long histories of human settlement. But this was an area that was also heavily impacted by the violence of the 1980s and 1990s when the Shining Path Rebellion was going on. And much of this area became depopulated due to the violence. And only recently did people move back to these communities. Tornavista, which is another landscape that's accessible by road, this highway that it's located on. You can't see this green pointer doesn't show up on this. This was actually one of the older feeder roads in this section of the Amazon. It was built originally in the 1950s that goes to the town of Tornavista, which is on the Pachitea river. And finally we have the Pisquis landscape, which is an area of Shepibu indigenous communities in the Pisquis watershed. And just over the border in Loretto. So we're looking at comparing the dynamics that we see in these areas. You'll see that there's these outlines drawn around these communities. It's because there is no administrative unit at the level of a community in the Amazon. So we established buffers around these areas. So in one portion of our study looking at land use change, we could bound to the landscape that we were talking about to have some comparative aspect to the spaces we were talking about. And we used multiple methods then. We used focus group interviews. We did over 30 focus groups with over 200 participants. We did a systematic household survey with over 300 interviews with families. Key informant interviews. And we also did some land use change analysis in collaboration with researchers at Temple University. So migration indicators improve. So when the proving government, while these statements about migration or migratory agriculture causing deforestation in the Amazon is quite vague, the Peruvian Census Bureau does have some indicators they use for migration. One of them is birthplace. So whether or not when they do the census, the individual that they're interviewing had been born in the place where they're being interviewed. So that's their primary indicator of migration. But they also have a second indicator, which is recent migrants. So these are people that have moved within the past five years. So when they do a census or a survey, when they find people that have recently arrived in an area, they're counted as recent migrants. So the question is where were the migrants in our sample? And how did they play out in these landscapes? And you'll see when looking at the first indicator, practically everybody is a migrant. 94% of the people we interviewed had been born elsewhere. So these were landscapes that were predominantly migrants. And across each of the sites we looked at, we found a very similar pattern with the exception of the Pesky area where there were more indigenous people that had been born in that community. And it doesn't show up here, but while they hadn't been born in these communities, many of these people had been born in the watershed, the indigenous, the people in the sample. When we looked at the origin of these informants, we found that actually most of them were Amazonians. So many of these people, while they're migrating to different places, they were shifting around spaces within the Amazon, not coming from the Andes and not coming from the coast. And there was some variation across the sites, particularly when you look at the sites, the landscapes that were accessible by road, you find there were more Andean people at these places. However, when you look more at depth at this information, many of these people that we're counting as Andean because they were born in the Andes, were often you'd find, for example, a 40-year-old man that had spent the last 35 years in the Amazon. So while these people were originally from the highlands, they had spent most of their life in the Amazon. So it was very difficult, while you often hear the criticism that Andean people move into the Amazon, don't understand the environment, they deforest land needlessly and fail. In fact, many of these people had lived most of their lives in the Amazon and were quite familiar with these environments and used to working within these spaces. But at recent migrants, there was a little bit different story. There were more people that were recent migrants, but not the majority of people in our samples. And again, there was some variation across the landscapes, but a much different pattern. I mean, rather than it being primarily the road settlements that were receiving people, we see that Abul Haal representing the people that were moving back after this period of violence shows up with a lot of recent migrants. Neshulia, another area that happened in the road, has received recent migrants, but then other places like Turnavista did not have that same pattern. So we are just in the process of doing this analysis. We haven't gone through, we haven't had the time to do more in-depth analysis on it, so it's still very descriptive. But we see that there doesn't seem to be the patterns that we expected when we look across these different landscapes. We purposely chose them to try to have a distinction between road accessible landscapes and riverina landscapes. And it's not playing out quite as we expected. So if we looked at how these people were explaining their patterns of migration, we found that there were a number of different drivers people cited. Many people were migrating to different locations in search of variable land. There was forced migration due to terrorism and violence, but also natural disasters, particularly in the riverine sites. Floods would destroy communities or river channels would shift and so people would have to move. They were searching for economic opportunity, wage labor, wage labor and opportunities to invest in land if they had income from other sources. But also searching for public services, primarily education. Healthcare was an issue, but primarily education was something people were looking for. As their children grew older, people wanted to move to communities that had access to high schools. Access to land was cited as the main driver of migration, but many of the non-Indigenous informants had been landowners in other areas. They didn't own much land, but they did have access to land in these other places. But we didn't find many of them that had large areas of land. So they were very much microfundia, very small properties that people were moving out to and then investing in these areas where they could get more land. These were long term stable settlements. The average informant had lived in the community for 19 years. Most villages had initially been settled in the 1970s and 1980s and they had done this through a process of spontaneous settlement. Residents had demarcated properties on their own in collaboration with their neighbors and they targeted areas that were forested because there were perceived as areas that were unused. So forest was seen as synonymous with available land, unused land. Even though the state was often claiming these areas as production forests. Later, once they were settled, the state would come in and formalize property rights of people in these areas, but they had a tendency to only title the forested areas. So even though people would claim properties that were much larger, they would find out as the titling brigades came through that there was this process of only recognizing areas that they were currently using or that were in fallow and forested areas were either excluded, unless in some cases people were willing and able to pay bribes, in which case they would receive title to their whole area. That's something that we're analyzing now to look at this variation between the types of rights people claim and I think it'll show up in the customary areas that people still claim. Five minutes? Okay, I'm about done. Most properties were small, about 34 hectares. There was some variation across the landscapes and farming was the major income source. However, it was mixed agriculture in most places, but in the accessible areas on roads where there was better market access, there was more cattle and cacao. This was partially due to crop substitution programs to try to eradicate cocoa production. And the average income in Peru is the minimum wage in Peru per month is just under $300. And so estimated income at these sites was roughly synonymous with the minimum wage. The road sites had a little bit better income opportunity compared to the riverine sites, but in general it was close to minimum wage. So looking at the land use data, just to give you some idea of the patterns of deforestation in Tornevista, you can see that there had been large parastatal cattle production areas in the 1980s that had collapsed. And so these areas drew colonists that moved in and invaded them. And you see typical fish bone deforestation patterns that you see in other parts of the Amazon. Similar in Nishuia, it starts out as production forest, gets invaded by colonists wanting to grow cocoa, and then gradually consolidates as more of an agricultural landscape. However, in the riverine sites, you see that there is some change, but not as dramatic. And most of the light green area you see are actually riparian forests that appear as secondary forests in this area. So there are shifts in the area covered by riparian forests, but it has probably a lot to do with shifts in flooding in any given year and how that affects that. And you could see in the Peskis, some of the landscapes, for example, on the top, is almost all the village closest to the Ukaiali River has almost no Tierra Fermi in highland areas. It's all flooded forest areas around the community. So looking at land use change in these areas, you could see that in the period of 1995 to 2005, there was dramatic forest loss. The green line indicates mature forest areas in the road sites. And this period of 95 to 2005 was the period of people moving back into rural areas after the violence. So there was periods of extreme violence and governance problems due to narco traffic. In the 1980s and 1990s, that was solved and people began moving back up to their sites. However, in the riverine sites, you don't see as big of a change over time. And in particular in the Peskis, the purple line represents secondary forest, which are mostly the riparian forests in this case. You can see that there's very little change and you have, while less mature forest, you have a much higher area of this secondary forest. And then looking at mature forest loss in these landscapes, you can see again it's much more dramatic in the road sites. And it's in this period when governance had improved in rural areas and people were moving in. Right now with the people at Temple University, we started out the study just looking at 10-year intervals. We're doing it again looking at 5-year intervals so we can try to pinpoint more exactly when these changes were taking place so we could then compare that to the information we have on people's arrival in these sites. So, what are the links between migration and deforestation based on this very descriptive information? First of all, migration and spontaneous occupation of forests does entail land use change. So, these were economic migrants searching for opportunities through agriculture. And when they arrived in these areas, forest policy tended to discourage small scale management options. So, even if people had been interested in maintaining forests, there were very few legal options available to them for that. But rather than a driver, we think that migration is more a symptom of the governance dynamics nationally or regionally. So, rather than being understood as a driver of deforestation, I think migration is one symptom of a number of other drivers that are causing change in these landscapes. We think that there could be a need or we think we can use this information to promote strategic policy dialogue needed to move beyond these broad generalizations. For example, forest management options to address migration, is there some way to facilitate local management in forest areas or viable options for forests and trees and small scale producers? We think that's a possibility, but it's necessary to place information on the table for policy makers to consider. Also, it's necessary to be thinking a little bit more detailed about deforestation. Whereas deforestation, we don't think all deforestation should be treated equally. So, there's questions of where is deforestation taking place? Who's involved in the deforestation? And what reason are they deforestation in these areas for? So, in conclusion, spontaneous settlement has produced grassroots regrarian reform in Peru. So, state lands are occupied by migrants. Later, state agencies formalize these claims. And the pattern results in forest conversion. So, much forest land is owned by the state. Forests are perceived as unused. And titling focuses on the cleared land. So, you have this spiral of deforestation being driven by this whole series of activities revolving around the way people perceive forests and the way this state tries to govern in these forests. However, migration patterns are not clearly linked to the deforestation patterns that we see. Infrastructural improvement definitely seems to be one of the main drivers in this area, which is not particularly surprising. Thank you. Thank you.