New land use change scenarios for Brazil: refining global SSPs with a regional spatially-explicit allocation model

Abstract

The future of land use and cover change in Brazil, in particular due to deforestation and forest restoration processes, is critical for the future of global climate and biodiversity, given the richness of its five biomes. These changes in Brazil depend on the interlink between global factors, due to its role as one of the main exporters of commodities in the world, and the national to local institutional, socioeconomic and biophysical contexts. Aiming to develop scenarios that consider the balance between global and local factors, a new set of land use change scenarios for Brazil were developed, aligned with the global structure Shared Socio-Economic Pathways (SSPs) and Representative Concentration Pathway (RCPs) developed by the global change research community. The narratives of the new scenarios align with SSP1/RCP 1.9, SSP2/RCP 4.5, and SSP3/RCP 7.0. The scenarios were developed combining the LuccME spatially explicit land change allocation modeling framework and the INLAND surface model to incorporate the climatic variables in water deficit. Based on detailed biophysical, socio-economic and institutional factors for each biome in Brazil, we have created spatially-explicit scenarios until 2050, considering the following classes: forest vegetation, grassland vegetation, planted pasture, agriculture, mosaic of small land uses, and forestry. The results aim at regionally detailing global models and could be used both regionally to support decision-making, but also to enrich global analysis.