s:3013:"TI Understanding local action and its consequences for global concerns in a forest margin landscape: the FALLOW model as a conceptual model of transitions from shifting cultivation 
AU Van, Noordwijk.M. 
AB Much of the international debate on natural resource management in the humid tropics
revolves around forests deforestation or forest conversion the consequences it has and the
way the process of change can be managed.  These issues involve many actors and aspects
and thus can benefit from many disciplinary perspectives. Yet no single discipline can
provide all the insights necessary to fully understand the problem as a first step towards
finding solutions that can work in the real world.  Professional and academic education is
still largely based on disciplines – and a solid background in the intellectual capital
accumulated in any of the disciplines is of great value.  If one wants to make a real
contribution to natural resource management issues however one should at least have
some basic understanding of the contributions other disciplines can make as well.
Increasingly universities are recognising the need for the next generation of scientists and
policymakers to be prepared for interdisciplinary approaches.  Thus this series of lecture
notes on integrated natural resource management in the humid tropics was developed
.
The lecture notes were developed on the basis of the experiences of the Alternatives to
Slash and Burn (ASB) consortium.  This consortium was set up to gain a better
understanding of the current land use decisions that lead to 
rapid
 conversion of tropical
forests shifting the forest margin and of the 
slow
 process of rehabilitation and
development of sustainable land use practices on lands deforested in the past.  The
consortium aims to relate local activities as they currently exist to the global concerns that
they raise and to explore ways by which these global concerns can be more effectively
reflected in attempts to modify local activities that stabilise forest margins.
The Rio de Janeiro Environment Conference of 1992 identified deforestation
desertification ozone depletion atmospheric CO
2
emissions and 
biodiversity as the major
global environmental issues of concern.  In response to these concerns the ASB
consortium was formed as a system-wide initiative of the Consultative Group on
International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) involving national and international research
institutes. 
ASB’s objectives are the development of improved land-use systems and policy
recommendations capable of alleviating the pressures on forest resources that are
associated with slash-and-burn agricultural techniques.  Research has been mainly
concentrated on the western Amazon (Brazil and Peru) the humid 
dipterocarp forests of
Sumatra in Indonesia the drier 
dipterocarp forests of northern Thailand in mainland
Southeast Asia the formerly forested island of Mindanao (the Philippines) and the Atlantic
Congolese forests of southern Cameroon. 
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