I am exploring why environmental degradation is continuing despite pressure from international institutions to make drastic and immediate changes. I have begun exploring the data set ForesSTAT from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN FAO). Considering the importance of forests to environmental and economic health, it may be a useful tool in understanding the larger puzzle of continued environmental degradation. Forestry is important environmentally to biodiversity, anti-air pollution, and water purification. Economically, products from forests can bolster a countries economy by selling both raw and finished goods into national and global markets. This broad database has various sections, this one focusing on forestry production and trade. The most recent data is from this year and some variables trace back to 1961. The data-set contains information to some extent on all 217 countries. They focus on the examination of production, import and export quantities and values in regards to forestry. The dataset breaks these concepts down by examining the various uses of forest products including wood fuel, industrial round-wood, logs, pulpwood, sawn wood, chemical wood pulp, paper products, household products among a few others. Understanding the products will help understand their worth. ForesSTAT also allows you to examine trade flows. If this method is chosen to be the best in exploring this puzzle, material that is not found within this database would include ranking the importance of products that are produced by deforestation are to the economic well-being of a country. Another, the rather obvious limitation, is examining if territories are grouped with their “motherland” or alone. It is vital that there is standardization between datasets when examining trends across countries. UN FAO also provides another dataset that allows examining countries physical forest coverage. In order to continue this research, I will need to examine another data set because ForesSTAT fails to show visually forest coverage over time.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. “FAO Forestry Country Information.” Last modified 2017, accessed May 28, 2013,
http://www.fao.org/forestry/country/en/
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. “Forestry Production and Trade.” Last modified 2017, accessed October 24, 2017, http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/FO
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. “Forestry Trade Flows.” Last modified 2017, accessed October 24, 2017, http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/FO
Zainab — you have identified a couple of good datasets here that are clearly relevant to your research. That is a good start. However, a couple important parts of the assignment are not addressed: which variable/indicator would you select for your DV? What is the level of measurement for that indicator? Keep thinking about these things as you work towards Research Design Sketch #1 as thinking about operationalization is part and parcel of thinking about data sources!