"Cities in the forest" and "cities of the forest": an environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) spatial approach to analyzing the urbanization-deforestation relationship in a Brazilian Amazon state
Renata Maciel Ribeiro, Silvana Amaral, Antônio Miguel Vieira Monteiro, Ana Paula Dal’Asta
Abstract
Contemporary urbanization has been reorganizing the territories and the socioeconomic relations in the Brazilian Amazon as a whole. We seek to identify a general typology of relationships between urbanization and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, in the light of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) theory. We have applied this approach to the 144 municipalities of Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon, in the inter-census interval from 2000 to 2010. The EKC approach included the spatial analysis method of geographically weighted regressions (GWR). Deforestation, measured by the PRODES program by Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE), was used as a measure of environmental degradation and the urbanization has been restricted to a socioeconomic characterizing, based on a set of 22 variables from the national census database, aggregated at the municipalities level. The results showed two main typologies: (1) the decreasing monotonic and (2)