Statistical confirmation of indirect land use change in the Brazilian Amazon

By E. Arima, P. Richards, R. Walker, Marcellus Marques Caldas. 2011

350 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Expansion of global demand for soy products and biofuel poses threats to food security and the environment. One environmental impact that has raised serious concerns is loss of Amazonian forest through indirect land use change (ILUC), whereby mechanized agriculture encroaches on existing pastures, displacing them to the frontier. This phenomenon has been hypothesized by many researchers and projected on the basis of simulation for the Amazonian forests of Brazil. It has not yet been measured statistically, owing to conceptual difficulties in linking distal land cover drivers to the point of impact. The present article overcomes this impasse with a spatial regression model capable of linking the expansion of mechanized agriculture in settled agricultural areas to pasture conversions on distant, forest frontiers. In an application for a recent period (2003–2008), the model demonstrates that ILUC is significant and of considerable magnitude. Specifically, a 10% reduction of soy in old pasture areas would have decreased deforestation by as much as 40% in heavily forested counties of the Brazilian Amazon. Evidently, the voluntary moratorium on primary forest conversions by Brazilian soy farmers has failed to stop the deforestation effects of expanding soy production. Thus, environmental policy in Brazil must pay attention to ILUC, which can complicate efforts to achieve its REDD targets.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/988bbacdfd0f639e331d7e8187430f8245ca68c8

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Citations in the corpus

Trajectories of deforestation, coffee expansion and displacement of shifting cultivation in the Central Highlands of Vietnam (2013, neutral): “Yet, this expansion of soybean may have driven deforestation indirectly by 631 displacing pastures further in the Amazon forest (Barona et al. 2010, Arima et al. 2011).”
Ethanol Expansion and Indirect Land Use Change in Brazil (2014, methodology): “The ILUC effects of other crops such as soybeans were analyzed by Lapola et al. (2010), Barona et al. (2010), Arima et al. (2011) and Macedo et al. (2012).”
Land use patterns and related carbon losses following deforestation in South America (2015, background): “Even so, crop expansion still places direct pressure on forests (Morton et al 2006) and can be an indirect driver of land use change by pushing pasture lands forward into the forest frontier (Nepstad et al 2006, Barona et al 2010, Arima et al 2011).”
Slowing Amazon deforestation through public policy and interventions in beef and soy supply chains (2014, neutral): “H1: Risk: Losing access to markets or credit X (7, 60) X (7) X (46) X (19, 57) X (59)”
Decoupling of deforestation and soy production in the southern Amazon during the late 2000s (2012, background): “Recent studies suggest that soy expansion and intensification inMT during the early part of the decade displaced cattle ranching northward into neighboring states (10, 22).”
System complexity and policy integration challenges: The Brazilian Energy- Water-Food Nexus (2019, background): “It could potentially occupy land currently used for soybean crops or cattle, depending on prices, and trigger ever more complex cascades of ILUC and deforestation [46].”
Enhancing the sustainability of commodity supply chains in tropical forest and agricultural landscapes (2013, background): “…2000; Gockowski and Sonwa, 2011), palm oil (e.g. Koh and Wilcove, 2008; Butler and Laurence, 2009; Gutiérrez-Vélez et al., 2011; Carlson et al., 2012), rubber (Li et al., 2007; Ziegler et al., 2009), and soybean (Nepstad et al., 2006; Barona et al., 2010; Arima et al., 2011; Macedo et al., 2012).”
Modelling complex systems of heterogeneous agents to better design sustainability transitions policy (2015, background): “Indeed, some deforestation occurs not directly because of an increasing consumption of agricultural commodities globally, but as a result of commodity prices fluctuating globally, due to self-reinforcing expectations of returns (e.g. Arima et al., 2011, Morton et al., 2006).”