In the piece, Boyd describes a heterogeneous network of firms, governments, and advocates developing REDD institutions simultaneously. He uses the metaphor of DNA to describe how frameworks and approaches from any particular effort can be combined and recombined into other efforts without passing through the bureaucracy of the UN. One respondent noted that a good deal of finance under the banner REDD has already begun to address drivers, well before the concept has acquired substantive meaning in the UNFCCC. “It’s hard to know which is the cart and which is the horse sometimes,” observed the respondent.For party and advocacy interviewees alike, the drivers themes is closely associated with a gathering debate about the appropriate uses for REDD finance. Several respondents noted that agricultural supply chains might be better suited to REDD finance than traditional government targets and forest landholders. Among this group, there was a sense that not only had existing lending been ineffective, it had been, as a consequence, heavily delayed by challenges finding appropriate borrowers and grantees. On the flip-side,blueberries in pots some advocates who are currently beneficiaries of REDD finance schemes argued that drivers are a low priority distraction that could threaten a “successful” model for REDD.
Yet another position questioned the wisdom of finance targeted for monitoring and evaluation of REDD at the expense of direct support for private sector activities. This subject argued that drivers might be helpful in rechanneling finance out of government hands and into the private sector. One respondent remarked that the insertion of drivers indicates a balkiness about the role of offsets from compliance markets to fund REDD activities. Drivers, this subject argued, indicates a growing credence in the “fund model” of REDD.In my interviews, several respondents keyed in on the “all parties” language in Paragraph 68 as signal of a focus on policy targets beyond landholders themselves and instead along land use-intensive supply chains. Several respondents saw the opportunity and some the need for synergy between formal REDD activities and other complementary government and NGO initiatives. Potential linkages mentioned included the commodity round tables . Others expressed hope that the legal model to crack down on the international trade of illegal tropical timber could be adopted for agricultural products.However, several parties have expressed skepticism about the political and legal potential of such a measure. The European Commission, meanwhile, has called for further research on the matter. In sum, demand-side and supply chain approaches to REDD represent a very different set of guiding principles than REDD as usual. In a sense, such approaches constitute the fourth cell of the 2X2—the public sphere as the root of the problem, and private sector as the site of intervention.
Finally how drivers relate to reference levels was a less common, but highly charged theme. Reference levels are estimates of the rate of deforestation in the absence of REDD. They are important to parties because they will form part of the basis for determining performance payments.61 In turn, drivers are important to reference levels because drivers are factors associated deforestation. One subject speculated that the high stakes of reference levels could pull along work to define drivers, but only if drivers are included in the reference levels discussion.Another, disagreed, worrying that linking the charged atmosphere of the reference levels debates with the efforts to define drivers could derail progress on defining drivers. The concern was that reference levels might politicize drivers and thereby limit progress to define them rigorously.Previous studies suggest that accelerating adoption of higher output, semi-intensive Brazilian cattle pasture intensification technologies can reduce direct GHG emissions, slow deforestation rates, and secure GHG benefits from bio-fuels production . Adoption of one or more semi-intensification technologies can directly reduce emissions from cattle systems by limiting enteric methane produced per unit meat and by reducing nitrous oxide emissions .
Direct reductions are notable, but they are an order of magnitude smaller than reductions estimated from avoided deforestation due to adoption of semi intensification systems. Such reductions could deliver a substantial fraction of the GHG mitigation pledged in the PNMC, Brazil’s Climate Law . Previous research suggests that land sparing from pasture intensification could also readily sop up the additional demand for land associated with bio-fuels mandates . However, previous estimates of the land sparing potential of cattle pasture intensification have shortcomings in their depictions of production systems, land use change processes, policies, and GHG impacts. One problem is the non-mechanistic representation of agricultural intensification processes. Rather than delineate all changes to the material and financial flows through the cattle systems, some studies depict boosted output alone. This approach does not allow representation of the full scope of mechanisms by which intensification shifts land use and therefore may misrepresent outcomes resultant from intensification processes. In such studies, intensification balances the spatial budget instead of depicting the land use change process using mechanisms consonant with economic principles and used at the cutting edge of land change science . Second, policies are also often highly stylized, depicted through constraints without practical analogs . Some modeled policies are implemented globally, belying limits to the authority of international law . Third,square plant pots though greenhouse gas emissions are of global salience and land use change processes are increasingly mediated by global markets, previous studies have focused on land use and greenhouse impacts at scales ranging from local to national . Global impacts from national land sparing policies have not been an explicit focus.This study investigates the global land use and GHG impacts of pasture intensification policies for achieving compliance with cattle ranching intensification targets specified in the Brazil National Climate Plan. We focus explicitly on three aspects of the problem that previous studies have not adequately addressed—a bottom-up, mechanistic representation of cattle production systems, policy interventions with practical analogs, and the effects of global trade. We employ the global economic land use simulation model GLOBIOM adapted to Brazil in order to represent global land use and GHG impacts of changes to land policies and pasture technologies in Brazil. The model consists of spatially explicit estimates of global crops, range lands and timber production potential spatially explicit product specific internal transportation costs in Brazil an economic model which represents the competition for land between the forestry, agriculture, and livestock sectors, and international trade for crops and livestock products. We introduce a semi-intensive pasture based cattle ranching alternative production type into the model. The production offers boosted yield per hectare and boosted costs of production per hectare. The main model outputs are crops, livestock and timber production, land use change, and GHG emissions from land use and agricultural sector, at a 50x50km resolution in Brazil for each 10 year-period over 2000-2030. Minimum levels of global food, timber and bio-energy demand are exogenously specified based on assumptions about population and economic growth.
We model two intensification policy mechanisms—a flat subsidy for all ranches adopting intensive alternatives and a flatly levied tax on all ranches that do not adopt intensive alternatives. Both of these interventions reduce the cost gap between higher cost semi-intensive alternative pasture systems and lower cost, business as usual pasture systems. We explore the extent to which international trade modulates the effects of these policies by comparing the model outcomes of freezing Brazilian external trade to the level observed in the baseline simulation or allowing external trade to adjust to the introduction of pasture intensification policies. The GHG impacts of the intensification policies are accounted as the difference between all GHG emissions over the modeled baseline scenario and all GHG emissions in each of the policy scenarios. In recent decades, the cattle sector of Brazil has expanded, shifted North and West, intensified, and become more export-oriented . Brazil has the largest commercial cattle herd, the second largest share of international trade in cattle products, and widespread adoption of semi-intensive pasture technologies. Semi-intensive adoption is largely associated with good domestic market access and fertile soils—higher rates of output per area can be found in the South, Southeast, and parts of the Center West of the country.64 Meanwhile, the geographic center of cattle production has continually migrated North and West in Brazil as an integral part of the frontier settlement and deforestation process . Internal demand for Brazilian cattle products is strong and growing. Per capita beef consumption is high and per capita consumption relative to GDP is higher. This despite the fact that prices are high relative to other countries of similar socio-economic status .Confinement facilities have emerged in the past decade, but they are cost competitive with pasture during only the height of the dry season and only in the core agricultural regions where land prices are higher than is typical . Age at slaughter has declined somewhat in the past two decades, but it still lags well behind producers in the U.S. and Europe . Growth in the sector has been uneven—fluctuations in currency, purchasing power, and export market access temper and enhance typical price dependent managerial fluctuations in slaughter rate and age class ratios known as the cattle cycle . Our baseline simulation depicts the period 2000-2030 in a fashion broadly concordant with the aforementioned patterns. Beef production in Brazil is simulated to increase to 13.4 million tons of carcass weight equivalent by 2030. This increase constitutes a modest 50 percent rise over production in 2011. Most of this increase will be associated with exports. We simulate Brazilian beef exports will to grow to represent 40 percent of the production in 2030 compared to 8 percent in 2000 and 24 percent in 2007 as reported by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization . The number of head of cattle is simulated to increase in all five political regions of Brazil across the simulation, but differentially. The Center West is simulated to remain the top cattle-producing region but its share would decrease due to rapidly rising cattle production in the North region . Part of the shift comports is due to agricultural expansion in the Center West and Southeast regions. Simulated crop farmers are willing to pay more for land than ranchers in these high fertility, market proximate regions. Prior to 2004, growth and change in the Brazilian cattle sector closely paralleled conversion of savannah and tropical forest in the North and West of Brazil . Remote sensing studies report that cattle ranching occupies between 50 percent and 80 percent of cleared Amazon rainforest land at some point in the initial years following clearing & Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation , 2011. However, in key frontier regions, the last five years has seen growth in cattle production unmatched by concomitant land conversion . This discontinuity has been interpreted as promising evidence of land sparing, but it also highlights the challenges of estimating the extent to which marginal growth in the cattle sector contributes to deforestation. We revisit this theme in our discussion session. Nevertheless, in some periods, cattle pasture and crops expand in a concerted fashion. New croplands arise closer to key infrastructure while new pasture arises close to the agricultural frontier . However, it is often the case that croplands arise through conversion of pasture. The net effect seems to be that crops are expanding more rapidly than pasture. Past trends in the balance of pasture, croplands and native vegetation in Brazil continue in our baseline simulation. Pasture and crops undergo modest gains and, for the most part, these come at the expense of native vegetation. We simulate less land abandonment than the rate that has been empirically observed in the Amazon biome & Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation , 2011. Land use change GHG effects from beef are uncertain, however, relative to other forms of food, beef is associated with substantially higher direct environmental impacts than other food products. Methane emissions, nitrous oxide emissions from soils, and nitrate water pollution are all major problems from cattle systems . Methane emissions aside, the bulk of the GHG effects are associated with land use changes that the literature attributes to cattle productions systems . However, these studies employ techniques for attributing land use change to cattle ranching that use correlational relationships between cattle pasture and deforestation as proxies for causal patterns.