Population growth, poverty, and environmental stress

Studies in Costa Rica and the Philippines analyze the underlying mechanisms that have led to resource degradation: land tenure policies, population growth, and narrow economic policies advanced during the debt crisis. In both countries migration patterns are also involved in the interaction between economic crisis, demographic change, legal institutions, and ecological problems. The linkages are multiple and complex. Both countries have seen a rapidly growing population migrating out of cities to easily degraded forest slopes due to poverty. Land management and tenure policies mitigate the effect of migration on the environment, but policy change is needed very badly in both countries.