Britaldo Soares-Filho

Modelling conservation in the Amazon basin

Expansion of the cattle and soy industries in the Amazon basin has increased deforestation rates and will soon push all-weather highways into the regions core. In the face of this growing pressure, a comprehensive conservation strategy for the Amazon basin should protect its watersheds, the full range of species and ecosystem diversity, and the stability of regional climates. Here we report that protected areas in the Amazon basin—the central feature of prevailing conservation approaches—are an important but insufficient component of this strategy, based on policy-sensitive simulations of future deforestation. By 2050, current trends in agricultural expansion will eliminate a total of 40% of Amazon forests, including at least two-thirds of the forest cover of six major watersheds and 12 ecoregions, releasing 32 ± 8 Pg of carbon to the atmosphere. One-quarter of the 382 mammalian species examined will lose more than 40% of the forest within their Amazon ranges. Although an expanded and enforced network of protected areas could avoid as much as one-third of this projected forest loss, conservation on private lands is also essential. Expanding market pressures for sound land management and prevention of forest clearing on lands unsuitable for agriculture are critical ingredients of a strategy for comprehensive conservation.

The Amazon basin in transition

Agricultural expansion and climate variability have become important agents of disturbance in the Amazon basin. Recent studies have demonstrated considerable resilience of Amazonian forests to moderate annual drought, but they also show that interactions between deforestation, fire and drought potentially lead to losses of carbon storage and changes in regional precipitation patterns and river discharge. Although the basin-wide impacts of land use and drought may not yet surpass the magnitude of natural variability of hydrologic and biogeochemical cycles, there are some signs of a transition to a disturbance-dominated regime. These signs include changing energy and water cycles in the southern and eastern portions of the Amazon basin.

Interactions among Amazon land use, forests and climate: prospects for a near-term forest tipping point

Some model experiments predict a large-scale substitution of Amazon forest by savannah-like vegetation by the end of the twenty-first century. Expanding global demands for biofuels and grains, positive feedbacks in the Amazon forest fire regime and drought may drive a faster process of forest degradation that could lead to a near-term forest dieback. Rising worldwide demands for biofuel and meat are creating powerful new incentives for agro-industrial expansion into Amazon forest regions. Forest fires, drought and logging increase susceptibility to further burning while deforestation and smoke can inhibit rainfall, exacerbating fire risk. If sea surface temperature anomalies (such as El Niño episodes) and associated Amazon droughts of the last decade continue into the future, approximately 55% of the forests of the Amazon will be cleared, logged, damaged by drought or burned over the next 20 years, emitting 15–26 Pg of carbon to the atmosphere. Several important trends could prevent a near-term dieback. As fire-sensitive investments accumulate in the landscape, property holders use less fire and invest more in fire control. Commodity markets are demanding higher environmental performance from farmers and cattle ranchers. Protected areas have been established in the pathway of expanding agricultural frontiers. Finally, emerging carbon market incentives for reductions in deforestation could support these trends.

dinamica—a stochastic cellular automata model designed to simulate the landscape dynamics in an Amazonian colonization frontier

dinamica, a spatially explicit simulation model of landscape dynamics has been developed. dinamica is a cellular automata model that presents multi-scale vicinity-based transitional functions, incorporation of spatial feedback approach to a stochastic multi-step simulation engine, and the application of logistic regression to calculate the spatial dynamic transition probabilities. This model was initially conceived for the simulation of Amazonian landscape dynamics, particularly the landscapes evolved in areas occupied by small farms. For testing its performance, the model was used to simulate spatial patterns of land-use and land-cover changes produced by the Amazonian colonists in clearing the forest, cultivating the land, and eventually abandoning it for vegetation succession. The study area is located in an Amazonian colonization frontier in the north of Mato Grosso state, Brazil. The model was run for two sub-areas of colonization projects, using an 8-year time span, from 1986 to 1994. The simulated maps were compared with land-use and land-cover maps, obtained from digital classification of remote sensing images, using the multiple resolution fitting procedure and a set of landscape structure measures, including fractal dimension, contagion index, and the number of patches for each type of land-use and land-cover class. The results from the validation methods for the two areas showed a good performance of the model, indicating that it can be used for replicating the spatial patterns created by landscape dynamics in Amazonian colonization regions occupied by small farms. Possible applications of dinamica include the evaluation of landscape fragmentation produced by different architectures of colonization projects and the prediction of a regions spatial pattern evolution according to various dynamic phases.

The End of Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

Government commitments and market transitions lay the foundation for an effort to save the forest and reduce carbon emission. Brazil has two major opportunities to end the clearing of its Amazon forest and to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions substantially. The first is its formal announcement within United Nations climate treaty negotiations in 2008 of an Amazon deforestation reduction target, which prompted Norway to commit

Cracking Brazil's Forest Code

1 billion if it sustains progress toward this target (1). The second is a widespread marketplace transition within the beef and soy industries, the main drivers of deforestation, to exclude Amazon deforesters from their supply chains (2) [supplementary online material (SOM), section (§) 4]. According to our analysis, these recent developments finally make feasible the end of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, which could result in a 2 to 5% reduction in global carbon emissions. The

Role of Brazilian Amazon protected areas in climate change mitigation

7 to

Abrupt increases in Amazonian tree mortality due to drought-fire interactions

18 billion beyond Brazils current budget outlays that may be needed to stop the clearing [a range intermediate to previous cost estimates (3, 4)] could be provided by the REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) mechanism for compensating deforestation reduction that is under negotiation within the UN climate treaty (5), or by payments for tropical forest carbon credits under a U.S. cap-and-trade system (6).

Committed carbon emissions, deforestation, and community land conversion from oil palm plantation expansion in West Kalimantan, Indonesia.

Brazils controversial new Forest Code grants amnesty to illegal deforesters, but creates new mechanisms for forest conservation. Roughly 53% of Brazils native vegetation occurs on private properties. Native forests and savannahs on these lands store 105 ± 21 GtCO2e (billion tons of CO2 equivalents) and play a vital role in maintaining a broad range of ecosystem services (1). Sound management of these private landscapes is critical if global efforts to mitigate climate change are to succeed. Recent approval of controversial revisions to Brazils Forest Code (FC)—the central piece of legislation regulating land use and management on private properties—may therefore have global consequences. Here, we quantify changes resulting from the FC revisions in terms of environmental obligations and rights granted to land-owners. We then discuss conservation opportunities arising from new policy mechanisms in the FC and challenges for its implementation.

Governance regime and location influence avoided deforestation success of protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon

Protected areas (PAs) now shelter 54% of the remaining forests of the Brazilian Amazon and contain 56% of its forest carbon. However, the role of these PAs in reducing carbon fluxes to the atmosphere from deforestation and their associated costs are still uncertain. To fill this gap, we analyzed the effect of each of 595 Brazilian Amazon PAs on deforestation using a metric that accounts for differences in probability of deforestation in areas of pairwise comparison. We found that the three major categories of PA (indigenous land, strictly protected, and sustainable use) showed an inhibitory effect, on average, between 1997 and 2008. Of 206 PAs created after the year 1999, 115 showed increased effectiveness after their designation as protected. The recent expansion of PAs in the Brazilian Amazon was responsible for 37% of the regions total reduction in deforestation between 2004 and 2006 without provoking leakage. All PAs, if fully implemented, have the potential to avoid 8.0 ± 2.8 Pg of carbon emissions by 2050. Effectively implementing PAs in zones under high current or future anthropogenic threat offers high payoffs for reducing carbon emissions, and as a result should receive special attention in planning investments for regional conservation. Nevertheless, this strategy demands prompt and predictable resource streams. The Amazon PA network represents a cost of US