Land Use Policy 39 (2014) 390–396 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Land Use Policy jo ur nal ho me pag e: www.elsevier.com/locate/landusepol Viewpoint Deforestation and land tenure in Mexico: A response to Bonilla-Moheno et al. M. Skutsch a,* , J.F. Mas a , G. Bocco a , B. Bee a,b , G. Cuevas a , Y. Gao a a Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Campus Morelia, Mexico b Department of Geography, Planning and the Environment, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858, USA a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 6 June 2013 Received in revised form 29 August 2013 Accepted 19 November 2013 Keywords: Deforestation REDD+ Remote sensing Tenure Sampling Methodology a b s t r a c t Bonilla-Moheno et al. published an interesting paper on land tenure as a determinant of deforestation in Mexico, in Land Use Policy in 2013. In this review, we focus critically on the methodology used by the authors to reach two key conclusions. Firstly, we suggest that their use of coarse resolution MODIS EVI data to assess deforestation rates may have resulted in an erroneous conclusion, that forest area in Mexico is increasing rather than decreasing. This finding is contrary to official data and to other recent scientific assessments. Secondly, we question their conclusion that territories under the tenure of ‘comunidades indigenas’ are less likely to experience deforestation, and more likely to experience expansion of forest area, than those under ‘ejidal’ tenure. We believe that the sampling method, which involved the selection of municipalities with high concentrations of one particular type of tenure, and which eliminated the 60% of municipalities which contain mixed forms of tenure, biased the sample, particularly for the case of comunidades. The comunidades included in the sample are almost all found in a single region of the country, which may represent a special case. In reality comunidades are much more widespread through the country. Moreover we find that the explanation given by the authors for the relative success of comunidades in conserving their forests is not founded in data from any study of process at the local level. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction The government of Mexico has become increasingly concerned about deforestation in the last decade, and with the prospect of participating in United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) policy of Reduced Emissions from Deforesta- tion and Forest Degradation (REDD+), the Federal Commission for Forestry (CONAFOR) is actively engaged in a public discussion pro- cess regarding the form in which loss of forests can be tackled. The article by Bonilla-Moheno et al. (‘Vegetation change and land tenure in Mexico: a country-wide analysis’) in Land Use Policy 39 (2013) is therefore a very timely contribution toward understanding the conditions under which deforestation takes place and its causes or drivers. This is by no means the first study which has looked at the drivers of forest cover change in Mexico (see for example Mas et al., 2004; Velazquez et al., 2003, 2008; Torres et al., 2008). Both insecure land tenure and poverty have been held by many authors to be related to deforestation, but this paper adds new per- spectives. If the conclusions of the paper are correct, they could have far reaching implications for the design of policies to reduce * Corresponding author. E-mail address: m.m.skutsch@utwente.nl (M. Skutsch). deforestation in Mexico. However, there are reasons to question these conclusions on grounds of the methodology that was used, and in this short response to the paper we query two of the key findings of the study. Two key conclusions of Bonhilla-Moheno et al. The paper in Land Use Policy builds on a parallel one (Bonilla- Moheno et al., 2012) which analyses forest cover change over the period 2001 and 2010 in Mexico (method described below), and which comes to a number of surprising conclusions regarding rates of deforestation, which form the starting point of the Land Use Pol- icy paper. The most striking is that overall, the woody cover in the country has increased, rather than decreased, over this period, and that this has occurred in all biomes except the tropical moist forest, where there have been small losses. In this parallel paper, the authors report that 16% of the all municipalities have experi- enced a net gain in forest cover and 4% a net loss, with an overall national increase of 96,000 ha (Bonilla-Moheno et al., 2012). These results are contrary to official estimates of forest cover change for this period (FAO, 2010; SEMARNAT, 2010), although it should be noted that the FAO figures are not independent but essentially based on the same data as the national (SEMARNAT) figures. How- ever, our own analysis (Mas and Cuevas, 2013) and other recent 0264-8377/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2013.11.013