Future environmental and agricultural impacts of Brazil’s Forest Code

Abstract

The role of improving the enforcement of Brazil's Forest Code in reducing deforestation in the Amazon has been highlighted in many studies. However, in a context of strong political pressure for loosening environmental protections, the future impacts of a nationwide implementation of the Forest Code on both environment and agriculture remain poorly understood. Here, we present a spatially explicit assessment of Brazil's 2012 Forest Code through the year 2050; specifically, we use a partial equilibrium economic model that provides a globally consistent national modeling framework with detailed representation of the agricultural sector and spatially explicit land-use change. We test for the combined or isolated impacts of the different measures of the Forest Code, including deforestation control and obligatory forest restoration with or without environmental reserve quotas. Our results show that, if rigorously enforced, the Forest Code could prevent a net loss of 53.4 million hectares (Mha) of forest and native vegetation by 2050, 43.1 Mha (81%) of which are in the Amazon alone. The control of illegal deforestation promotes the largest environmental benefits, but the obligatory restoration of illegally deforested areas creates 12.9 Mha of new forested area. Environmental reserve quotas further protect 5.8 Mha of undisturbed natural vegetation. Compared to a scenario without the Forest Code, by 2050, cropland area is only reduced by 4% and the cattle herd by 8%. Our results show that compliance with the Forest Code requires an increase in cattle productivity of 56% over four decades, with a combination of a higher use of supplements and an adoption of semi-intensive pasture management. We estimate that the enforcement of the Forest Code could contribute up to 1.03 PgCO 2 e to the ambitious GHG emissions reduction target set by Brazil for 2030.

National Borders and the Conservation of Nature

“…Most notably, the New Forest Code enacted in late 2012, and disputed in the Supreme Court until 2018, set an amnesty for "small" properties that had deforested Legal Reserve areas before 2008 -in practice, forgiving 90 percent of the rural properties in the area for engaging in crimes of illegal deforestation (Soares-Filho et al, 2014). This reversal is consistent with the hypothesis that environmental protection was weakened and reversed under political pressure (Fearnside, 2016;Azevedo et al, 2017;Freitas et al, 2018;Soterroni et al, 2018). Newly released satellite data therefore allows us to document this widespread reversal across the Brazilian Amazon, and in particular, our border analysis shows that this is a uniquely Brazilian phenomenon.…”

“…The only exception is when using 11km bandwidth, OLS estimation and triangular kernel (when cluster-robust p-value is equal to 0.16). recent reversal is due to political and economic crises colliding with a weakening of forest conservation laws in Brazil (Soares-Filho et al, 2014;Ferreira et al, 2014;Fearnside, 2016;Azevedo et al, 2017;Freitas et al, 2018;Soterroni et al, 2018).…”

“…Environmental regulation. As consequence of this political shift, the congress approved 25 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/04/world/americas/brazil-rainforest-amazon-conservation-electionrousseff-silva.html?_r=0 26 See, e.g., Tollefson (2016); Fearnside (2016); Viola and Franchini (2017); Crouzeilles et al (2017); Rochedo et al (2018); Freitas et al (2018); Soterroni et al (2018); Tollefson (2018). 27 Still in President Lula's government, Ms. Rousseff had an investment agenda to promote growth (Plano de Acelera;'ao do Crescimento, PAC) and was an antagonist of Ms. Marina Silva, the Minister of Environment who led PPCDAm.…”

Pathways for a Brazilian biobased economy: towards optimal utilization of biomass

“…Most of the legal mechanisms meant to reduce deforestation are part of the Brazilian Forest Code. However, the latest revisions of the Forest Code (2012) are not yet (fully) implemented due to lobbying from, e.g., agribusiness . On the contrary, new laws outside the Forest Code were put into force in 2017 that enabled private land owners to legalize their land holdings, allowing for land grabbing and subsequently leading to deforestation .…”

A review of global-local-global linkages in economic land-use/cover change models

“…Historical validation or 'hindcasting,' the second and most common approach to the validation challenge in global modeling, relies on the comparison of simulated outputs to historical 'real-world' data. This method has become standard in climate modeling (Oreskes et al 1994, Brands et al 2013, but there are relatively few recent examples of historical validation of agro-economic models (Schmitz et al 2012, Chen and Khanna 2018, Soterroni et al 2018, Yao et al 2018. One notable example is offered by Dietrich et al (2014) who ran the MAgPIE model over the period 1995-2060 and examined productivity changes at the continental scale, comparing predictions to historical observations over the decade from 1995 to 2005.…”