Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 24th Aug 2026, 01:44:58am WEST
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Daily Overview |
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Biodiversity and Land Conservation 2 Location: B002 Session Chair: Paul Dingkuhn, Wageningen University | |
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Forging conservation: The Legacy of 18th-Century Metallurgy on Forest Conservation 1: Paris School of Economics, France; 2: INRAE; 3: CNRS; 4: ENS Can historical industries leave unexpectedly protective environmental legacies? This paper examines the long-term effects of pre-industrial metallurgical activity on forest conservation in Belgium. Using newly assembled spatially geolocated data on eighteenth-century forges combined with contemporary high-resolution forest records, we model the historical determinants of forge placement and estimate their persistent impact on land use. Instrumented forge presence significantly increases the likelihood of old-growth forest today—by roughly 25 percentage points—while reducing the probability of recent afforestation by more than 50 percentage points. These results suggest that charcoal-dependent industries, by relying on stable and highly localized forest inputs, unintentionally preserved forest cover and dampened later conversion pressures, even long after the transition to coal. More broadly, the findings illustrate how resource-dependent production systems can generate durable path dependencies that shape environmental landscapes over centuries. | |