NWO Vidi · 2025–2030 · Wageningen University
Why did the rise of global colonial trade since 1850 cause massive deforestation in some areas of the “Global South”, but not in others? Southeast Asia suffered some of the highest deforestation rates in the world and offers a rich area for study due to its political and social-economic diversity. In this project, long-run deforestation rates in insular Southeast Asia are reconstructed from colonial-era vegetation and topographic maps and statistical materials. To explain the observed patterns of spatial environmental change, researchers examine the interaction of global commodity trade with colonial policies, local land rights, and socio-economic and political inequalities.
Team
Pim de Zwart
Principal investigator
Pim leads the project and investigate Malaysian deforestation and how variation in local institutional conditions drove varied rates of deforestation.
Angelo Galindo
PhD candidate
Angelo is a historical geographer and, though archival and geospatial analyses, reconstructs changes in Philippine forests and landscapes since 1850. He examines how colonial governance, forest exploitation and local practices shaped these transformations.
Dea Iftina
PhD candidate
Dea explores the history of deforestation in Indonesia and its links to colonialism, commodity production and customary land rights. She has a background in economics and uses historical sources alongside quantitative and spatial methods.
Output
2026
Nawiyanto and P. de Zwart, ‘From Conversion to Conservation: Frontier Expansion and Forests in the Eastern Salient of Colonial Java’, Environment and History.
This project is generously funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) through research grant VI.Vidi.231F.019