You are in Geoinformatics Creative Commons Resources :: Soy Moratorium :: Modelling the Soy Moratorium
A project supported by SNAPP: Science for Nature & People Partnership, National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, UC Santa Barbara.
This project is an outcome of the SNAPP project 12704 "Land-use change and conservation policy in Brazil and the U.S. for biodiversity, ecosystem services and economic returns" and is supported by NCEAS, UC Santa Barbara.
The soy moratorium is a private sector agreement signed by the major soybean traders pledging not to purchase soy grown on cleared forestland after July 2006 in the Brazilian Amazon. During 2004 and 2005 30% of soy expansion in this region occurred through deforestation. In 2014, only about 1% of the new soy expansion in the Amazon biome was produced on recently deforested land. The soy moratorium for Amazonia has been extended indefinitely.
The main goal of this six-month project is to evaluate impact of the soy moratorium on reducing deforestation in Brazil, considering also existing regulations such as Brazil’s Forest Code.
The main analytical tool will be GLOBIOM-Brazil model, a global recursive dynamic partial equilibrium model that includes the main sectors competing for land (agriculture, forestry and bioenergy). It operates on 50 km x 50 km grid cells, and will provide large-scale regional impacts on deforestation, emissions, agriculture, livestock and wood production, exports and imports. Because of its multisectorial and multiregional construction, GLOBIOM-Brazil has been used as a valuable tool to analyze long-term land-use change scenarios and assess the impacts of land use policies. The idea is then to use the Forest Code scenarios built under the REDD-PAC project to assess the future impacts of soy moratorium by including and excluding constraints on conversion from mature forests to soy expansion. Counter-factual scenarios considering what happens without the soy moratorium will also be designed to measure the effects of this zero-deforestation agreement.
Many of the members of the SNAP team are interested in the impacts of sustainable supply chains, and the soy moratorium provides a good example of what can be achieved when the private sector works together with NGOs and the public institutions. We have good data on the direct impacts on the soy moratorium, since our collaborators have been following the moratorium with remote sensing data. There is also the question whether the soy moratorium should end, given the expectations of improved enforcement of the Forest Code.
This report would help conservation organizations to get more information about the effects of soy supply chain management in Brazil.
| Description | Date due | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Adapting GLOBIOM-Brazil to model the Soy Moratorium | Aug 15st, 2016 |
| 2 | Report with the analysis of land use trajectories related to soy production. | Oct 1st, 2016 |
| 3 | Report with the results of the study of the impacts of the soy moratorium. | Dec 1st, 2016 |
| Purpose | Target date | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kick-off project meeting: Discuss how we plan to use GLOBIOM-Brazil to assess the impacts of soy moratorium and what we need in terms of data | June 1st, 2016 |
| 2 | Discuss the first product (P1) with the results of BAU (business as usual) and FC (Forest Code) scenarios with improvements in the data set but without the soy moratorium. | Aug 1st, 2016 |
| 3 | Discuss the second product (P2) with the preliminary results of the impacts of the soy moratorium. | Oct 1st, 2016 |
| 4 | Discuss the third product (P3) with the final results of the soy moratorium and extension of the soy moratorium to the Cerrado biome. Discuss the possible publication of the study in a scientific journal. | Dec 1st, 2016 |