Who owns the Brazilian carbon?

Abstract

Brazil is one of the major contributors to land-use change emissions, mostly driven by agricultural expansion for food, feed, and bioenergy feedstock. Policies to avoid deforestation related to private commitments, economic incentives, and other support schemes are expected to improve the effectiveness of current command and control mechanisms increasingly. However, until recently, land tenure was unknown for much of the Brazilian territory, which has undermined the governance of native vegetation and challenged support and incentive mechanisms for avoiding deforestation. We assess the total extent of public governance mechanisms protecting aboveground carbon (AGC) stocks. We constructed a land tenure dataset for the entire nation and modeled the effects and uncertainties of major land-use acts on protecting AGC stocks. Roughly 70% of the AGC stock in Brazil is estimated to be under legal protection, and an additional 20% is expected to be protected after areas in the Amazon with currently undesignated land undergo a tenure regularization. About 30% of the AGC stock is on private land, of which roughly two-thirds are protected. The Cerrado, Amazon, and Caatinga biomes hold about 40%, 30%, and 20% of the unprotected AGC, respectively. Effective conservation of protected and unprotected carbon will depend on successful implementation of the Forest Act, and regularization of land tenure in the Amazon. Policy development that prioritizes unprotected AGC stocks is warranted to promote conservation of native vegetation beyond the legal requirements. However, different biomes and land tenure structures may require different policy settings considering local and regional specifics. Finally, the fate of current AGC stocks relies upon effective implementation of command and control mechanisms, considering that unprotected AGC in native vegetation on private land only accounts for 6.5% of the total AGC stock.

How is biodiversity protection influencing the potential for bioenergy feedstock production on grasslands?

“…However, in practice, farmers’ preferences strongly influence the localization of legal reserves. Farmers usually cultivate the most suitable lands and set aside areas for preservation of native vegetation that are least suitable for agriculture (Freitas et al, ). Yet, farmers’ preferences concerning land allocation often align with conservation objectives.…”

“…We assessed the legal framework for the protection of biodiverse grassland in Brazil and used the database constructed in Freitas et al () to (a) estimate the extent of “non‐natural grassland” that is defined as the areas, including agriculture land, that are classified as grassland vegetation but are not native grassland and (b) estimate the shares of protected existing natural grassland on public and private lands.…”

“…In the base protection scenario, we define highly biodiverse natural and non‐natural grasslands as being equal to the areas in the grassland region that are protected as indigenous reserves or conservation units based on Brazil (). The higher protection case in addition includes grassland protection on privately owned lands through the Brazilian Forest Act (Brazil, ), the central legal framework for the protection of natural vegetation on private rural properties (Freitas et al, ; Sparovek, Barretto, Matsumoto, & Berndes, ). It requires farmers to preserve the natural vegetation within a minimum buffer zone from watercourses and lakes (riparian zones).…”

Análise De Iniciativas De Redd+ Na Perspectiva De Responsabilização E Permanência Dos Recursos Florestais

“…Número de iniciativas Percentual De forma complementar aos dados sobre desmatamento, é importante levar em conta a influência dos diferentes tipos de propriedade para a conservação florestal. Levantamento realizado por Freitas et al (2018) na Amazônia indica que 65% dos estoques de carbono acima do solo, considerando a vegetação nativa, estão em áreas públicas protegidas, o que demonstra a capacidade de armazenamento dessas áreas.…”

The Low Opportunity Costs of the Amazon Soy Moratorium

“…The soy suitability map, which was used to identify areas that are biophysically suitable for cropland expansion, was produced using the methods described in Brandão et al (2020) to merge a 30 × 30 m grid cell map of areas with and without restrictions for growing soy and a 60 × 60 m resolution map with integer values indicating degree of suitability (Soares-Filho et al, 2014;Rudorff and Oliveira, 2016). Property maps from three public sources were combined to produce a single map with public cadaster data from INCRA taking priority in the case of overlaps of boundaries between sources, followed by boundaries of those properties undergoing regularization in the Terra Legal program, and finally boundaries of properties in the Rural Environmental Registry (commonly known by its Portuguese-language acronym of CAR) (SFB [Serviço Florestal Brasileiro] (Freitas et al, 2018). CAR properties that could be identified as INCRA settlements were removed as well as those whose centroid fell within a federal or state protected area, but all other boundaries, including individual properties within settlement areas, were retained to minimize subjectivity in the analysis (IUCN [International Union for Conservation of Nature], 2020).…”