Uncovering the conservation effectiveness of community forests: A case study from Shan State in Myanmar

Community forestry is a regime of forest management that engages local communities to conserve forests and improve their livelihoods. As the number of community-conserved forests grows, a growing body of evidence indicates the positive effects of community forests in reducing deforestation. However, there is little analysis encompassing the comprehensive effectiveness of community forests (CFs) in terms of deforestation, forest degradation, forest cover change and forest increase. Here, we conducted a comprehensive analysis to investigate the influence of CFs on these aspects between 2015 and 2019 in two watershed conservation forests in Myanmar. We used visual interpretation of very high-resolution satellite imagery and applied propensity score matching to ensure a balanced distribution of covariates. When compared directly, deforestation inside CFs (5.08 %) were higher than those outside CFs (3.89 %), while forest degradation (23.73 %) and forest increase (11.86 %) inside CFs were lower than those outside CFs (24.9 % and 16.34 %, respectively). However, these differences were not significant, and the matching results showed that CFs did not exhibit significant control over deforestation, forest degradation, forest cover change, and improvements in forest cover compared to areas outside CFs. We conclude that establishing community forests alone does not guarantee forest conservation in the short term. Therefore, community-based forest management practices are needed to address deforestation and forest degradation and achieve effective forest conservation aligned with local needs. •Effective management of community forests (CFs) in the short term is challenging.•CFs have shown no significant effect on forest conservation.•Visual interpretation enhances the assessment of CFs' role in forest conservation.•Management practices aligned with local needs may improve forest conservation.