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.

• What are impacts of keeping or removing the soy moratorium on land use and carbon in the Amazon biome?
• What would be the impacts of extending the soy moratorium to the Cerrado biome?
• Does the effect of the soy moratorium depend upon the degree of enforcement of the Forest Code? What are the unintended consequences of these policies (e.g., leakage)?

• Joe Fargione, The Nature Conservancy

• Steve Polasky, University of Minnesota
• Carlos Durigan, WCS Brazil
• Joe Fargione, The Nature Conservancy
• Derric Pennington, World Wildlife Fund
• Andrew Plantinga, UC Santa Barbara

• Josh Lawler, University of Washigton
• Sebastian MartinuzzI, University of Wiscosin
• Eric Nelson, Bowdoin College
• John C. Withey, Florida International University
• Ashley Larsen, UC Berkeley
• Claire Runge, NCEAS, UC Santa Barbara

• Ruben Lubowski, Environmental Defense Fund
• Leandro Baumgartem, TNC Brazil
• Don Eaton, Karl Didier, Camila Fagundes, Wildlife Conservation Society, Brazil
• Mario Barroso e Edegar Rosa, WWF Brasil

• Gilberto Camara, INPE
• Fernando Ramos, INPE
• Aline Soterroni, INPE
• Pedro Andrade, INPE
• Alexandre Ywata de Carvalho, IPEA
• Aline Mosnier, IIASA