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Economic drivers of deforestation in the Brazilian Legal Amazon

Nature Sustainability (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Deforestation in the Brazilian Legal Amazon remains a challenge due to its detrimental effects on ecosystems and the associated increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Such deforestation can be driven by foreign demand in terms of international exports, as well as domestic demand. However, most efforts to quantify the associations between consumer markets and deforestation mainly consider international exports rather than domestic and local sources of demand. Here we show that economic demand originating in the more developed Brazilian centre-south imposes a much stronger pressure on the Amazon’s deforestation than local (within the Amazon) and foreign export demand. Acknowledging domestic markets as a critical driver of changes in forest cover in the region emphasizes the need for increased engagement by national and transnational stakeholders operating in national markets in Brazil. Domestic environmental traceability must be linked to sanitary and fiscal controls at interstate and interregional borders, helping promote transparency in the deforestation intensity of inputs and products originating from the Brazilian Legal Amazon. This would promote sustainability by better informing policymakers about potential future stress regarding the Amazon’s resources under different scenarios of population growth, socio-economic development paths, institutional reforms and technical change.

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Fig. 1: Regional indicators for the LAM.
Fig. 2: Traded GDP and deforestation in exports, by origin of demand.
Fig. 3: Regional traded GDP and deforestation in exports, by origin of demand.

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Data availability

The data for the IOM-LAM are available at https://www.wribrasil.org.br/sites/default/files/2023-06/NEA_MIIP-AML.xlsx. The deforestation data are available via figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.23906274 (ref. 53). Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The code is publicly available via figshare at https://figshare.com/s/ebf63cc5436c374d398a (ref. 53).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

    Eduardo A. Haddad, Inácio F. Araújo & Ademir Rocha

  2. Faculté de Gouvernance, Sciences Économiques et Sociales, Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique, Rabat, Morocco

    Eduardo A. Haddad

  3. University of São Paulo Regional and Urban Economics Lab, São Paulo, Brazil

    Eduardo A. Haddad, Inácio F. Araújo, Ademir Rocha & Karina S. Sass

  4. World Resources Institute, São Paulo, Brazil

    Rafael Feltran-Barbieri

  5. Department of Economics, Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Juiz de Fora, Brazil

    Fernando S. Perobelli

  6. Institute of Advanced Studies, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

    Carlos A. Nobre

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Contributions

E.A.H. conceived and designed the experiments. E.A.H., I.F.A. and A.R. performed the experiments. E.A.H., I.F.A., R.F.-B., F.S.P., A.R. and K.S.S. analysed the data. E.A.H., I.F.A., R.F.-B., F.S.P., A.R., K.S.S. and C.A.N. contributed materials/analysis tools. E.A.H. wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Eduardo A. Haddad.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Sustainability thanks Manfred Lenzen and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary information presented as a single PDF file: (1) ‘Methodology’ and (2) ‘Companion to the Interregional Input-Output System for the Legal Amazon, 2015’.

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Supplementary Data 1

Data prepared by the authors to be used in the model.

Supplementary Code 1

Data and code that enable replicability of the results of the paper (also available on figshare).

Source data

Source Data Fig. 1

Data prepared by the authors and presented as maps in Fig. 1.

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Haddad, E.A., Araújo, I.F., Feltran-Barbieri, R. et al. Economic drivers of deforestation in the Brazilian Legal Amazon. Nat Sustain (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01387-7

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