Claudia M. Stickler

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

Slowing Amazon deforestation through public policy and interventions in beef and soy supply chains.

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

Responding to climate change and the global land crisis: REDD+, market transformation and low-emissions rural development

7 to

More food, more forests, fewer emissions, better livelihoods: linking REDD+, sustainable supply chains and domestic policy in Brazil, Indonesia and Colombia

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).

Managing the Tropical Agriculture Revolution

The recent 70% decline in deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon suggests that it is possible to manage the advance of a vast agricultural frontier. Enforcement of laws, interventions in soy and beef supply chains, restrictions on access to credit, and expansion of protected areas appear to have contributed to this decline, as did a decline in the demand for new deforestation. The supply chain interventions that fed into this deceleration are precariously dependent on corporate risk management, and public policies have relied excessively on punitive measures. Systems for delivering positive incentives for farmers to forgo deforestation have been designed but not fully implemented. Territorial approaches to deforestation have been effective and could consolidate progress in slowing deforestation while providing a framework for addressing other important dimensions of sustainable development.

Financiamento internacional para o setor agroindustrial no Mato Grosso: uma oportunidade para conservação?

Climate change and rapidly escalating global demand for food, fuel, fibre and feed present seemingly contradictory challenges to humanity. Can greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from land-use, more than one-fourth of the global total, decline as growth in land-based production accelerates? This review examines the status of two major international initiatives that are designed to address different aspects of this challenge. REDD+ is an emerging policy framework for providing incentives to tropical nations and states that reduce their GHG emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. Market transformation, best represented by agricultural commodity roundtables, seeks to exclude unsustainable farmers from commodity markets through international social and environmental standards for farmers and processors. These global initiatives could potentially become synergistically integrated through (i) a shared approach for measuring and favouring high environmental and social performance of land use across entire jurisdictions and (ii) stronger links with the domestic policies, finance and laws in the jurisdictions where agricultural expansion is moving into forests. To achieve scale, the principles of REDD+ and sustainable farming systems must be embedded in domestic low-emission rural development models capable of garnering support across multiple constituencies. We illustrate this potential with the case of Mato Grosso State in the Brazilian Amazon.

Globalization of the Amazon Soy and Beef Industries: Opportunities for Conservation

The triple, intertwined challenges of climate change, the conversion of tropical forests to crop lands and grazing pastures, and the shortage of new arable land demand urgent solutions. The main approaches for increasing food production while sparing forests and lowering carbon emissions include sustainable supply chain initiatives, domestic policies and finance, and REDD+. These approaches are advancing largely in isolation, separated by different scales of intervention, performance metrics and levers for shaping land user behavior. As a result of this disconnect, farmers are receiving few, if any, positive incentives to forgo legal forest clearing and to invest in more sustainable production systems. These three approaches could become mutually reinforcing through integrated, performance-based incentive systems operating across regions and scales, linked through a shared metric of jurisdiction-wide performance introduced here as the Jurisdictional Performance System.

The potential ecological costs and cobenefits of REDD: a critical review and case study from the Amazon region

ABSTRACT Industrial production of beef, soybeans, cotton, and biofuels is expanding into the tropical latitudes of South America and may soon reach tropical Africa in the most important agricultural transition since the Green Revolution. This shift is driven by the shortage of land suitable for expansion of cultivation and grazing in the temperate zone, increased global demands for agricultural commodities, the rising price of petroleum, and technological advances. At risk are some of the worlds most ecologically and culturally-rich landscapes in the world, such as the Amazon rainforest, the Cerrado woodland complex, and African savannas. A strategy for reducing the negative ecological and social impacts of this transition could harness the rising environmental and social standards imposed by many importers and purchasers of agricultural commodities, similar reforms underway among “Equator” banks, growing corporate governance, and Brazils prominence in international diplomacy. Integrated certification of commodity sanitation, compliance with rigorous environmental standards, and sound labor practices could become the norm for participation in commodity markets. These reforms in agro-industrial behavior could be reinforced by trade agreements and strategic support from non-governmental organizations.

Nutritional Correlates of Population Density Across Habitats and Logging Intensities in Redtail Monkeys (Cercopithecus ascanius)1

A crise do padrao de acumulacao que sustentou o crescimento intensivo capitalista desde o posguerra ate a virada dos anos 70 tem suscitado, ao longo das ultimas decadas, inumeros esforcos teoricos para compreender/explicar as causas historico/sociologicas (economico/politicas) presentes na raiz de todo este processo. O presente trabalho propoe-se levantar algumas questoes de ordem teorica mais geral, atentando para o fato de que a nova crise, que e tambem uma crise de acumulacao, ocorre no contexto de um capitalismo de bases produtivo- institucionais ja globalizadas, o que exige novos desenvolvimentos teoricos e novas abordagens para o que tem sido denominado “nova reestruturacao produtiva”.