Agriculture and biodiversity damage: A prospective evaluation of the impact of Brazilian agriculture on its ecoregions through life cycle assessment methodology

Abstract

The natural ecosystems' replacement by farmland and the consequent biodiversity damage (BD) for agriculture are one of the principal concerns worldwide. The development of the life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology involves enormous efforts to include BD parameters and develop a prospective LCA approach for future evaluations of production and technologies use. Thus, this work aims to determine the current impacts and estimate the future impacts in terms of damage to biodiversity caused by land occupation by agricultural commodities produced in Brazil, such as coffee, corn, oranges, and sugar cane, for the six ecoregions present in the country—Amazon, Atlantic Forest, Caatinga, Cerrado, Pampas, and Pantanal—in the 20-year period from 2015 to 2035. For this and to search for hotpots, we applied the indicators proposed by Chaudhary and Books (2018), for inventories whose functional unit is production per m2 of 1 kg of crop. Although the Cerrado is one of the ecoregions in which deforestation has advanced the most, it has the area/production ratio that has evolved the most. In contrast, Pampas and Caatinga, which are not seen as agricultural frontiers, increased their impacts. The most optimistic scenarios for the future have been those in regions considered agricultural frontiers; however, these are the regions where agriculture is more technologically developed, for example, coffee production in the Atlantic Forest and in the Cerrado. The results indicate that the technological development of agriculture can contribute to mitigating the impacts of damage to biodiversity in the future, and that the implementation of legislative and inspection measures is fundamental to supporting the correct use of the soil and preventing illegal soil change. Otherwise, in the future, we will see the increasing disappearance of species. Thus, we need researchers, farmers, and policy makers to move from development to conservation.