Global demands for agricultural and forestry products provide economic incentives for deforestation across the tropics. Much of this deforestation occurs with a lack of information on the spatial distribution of benefits and costs of deforestation. To inform global sustainable land-use policies, we combine geographic information systems (GIS) with a meta-analysis of ecosystem services (ES) studies to perform a spatially explicit analysis of the trade-offs between agricultural benefits, carbon emissions, and losses of multiple ecosystem services because of tropical deforestation from 2000 to 2012. Even though the value of ecosystem services presents large inherent uncertainties, we find a pattern supporting the argument that the externalities of destroying tropical forests are greater than the current direct economic benefits derived from agriculture in all cases bar one: when yield and rent potentials of high-value crops could be realized in the future. Our analysis identifies the Atlantic Forest, areas around the Gulf of Guinea, and Thailand as areas where agricultural conversion appears economically efficient, indicating a major impediment to the long-term financial sustainability of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) schemes in those countries. By contrast, Latin America, insular Southeast Asia, and Madagascar present areas with low agricultural rents (ARs) and high values in carbon stocks and ES, suggesting that they are economically viable conservation targets. Our study helps identify optimal areas for conservation and agriculture together with their associated uncertainties, which could enhance the efficiency and sustainability of pantropical land-use policies and help direct future research efforts.

全球对农业和林业产品的需求为整个热带地区的森林砍伐提供了经济诱因。大部分的森林砍伐都是在缺乏有关森林砍伐收益和成本的空间分布方面的信息的情况下发生的。为了为全球可持续土地使用政策提供信息，我们将地理信息系统（GIS）与生态系统服务（ES）研究的荟萃分析相结合，对农业收益，碳排放和农业损失之间的权衡取舍进行了空间明确的分析。在2000年至2012年间由于热带森林砍伐而提供了多种生态系统服务。即使生态系统服务的价值存在巨大的内在不确定性，我们发现一种支持这种论点的模式，即在所有情况下，破坏热带森林的外部性都大于从农业中获得的当前直接经济利益，只有一种情况：将来可以实现高价值农作物的单产和租金潜力。我们的分析将大西洋森林，几内亚湾周围的地区和泰国视为农业转化在经济上有效的地区，这表明在这些地区减少砍伐森林和森林退化（REDD +）计划的长期财务可持续性受到重大阻碍国家。相比之下，拉丁美洲，东南亚岛屿和马达加斯加的地区农业租金（ARs）低，碳储量和ES的价值高，表明它们是经济上可行的保护目标。