Historical land use change and associated carbon emissions in Brazil from 1940 to 1995

Abstract

The evaluation of impacts of land use change is in general limited by the knowledge of past land use conditions. Most publications on the field present only a vague description of the earlier patterns of land use, which is usually insufficient for more comprehensive studies. Here we present the first spatially explicit reconstruction of historical land use patterns in Brazil, including both croplands and pasturelands, for the period between 1940 and 1995. This reconstruction was obtained by merging satellite imagery with census data, and provides a 5′ × 5′ yearly data set of land use for three different categories (cropland, natural pastureland and planted pastureland) for Brazil. The results show that important land use changes occurred in Brazil. Natural pasture dominated in the 1950s and 1960s, but since the beginning of 1970s it has been gradually replaced by planted pasture, especially in southeast and center west of Brazil. The croplands began its expansion in the 1960s reaching extensive areas in almost all states in 1980. Carbon emissions from historical land use changes were calculated by superimposing a composite biomass map on grids of a weighted average of the fractions of the vegetation types and the replacement land uses. Net emissions from land use changes between 1940 and 1995 totaled 17.2 ± 9.0 Pg‐C (90% confidence range), averaging 0.31 ± 0.16 Pg‐C yr−1, but reaching up to 0.47 ± 0.25 Pg‐C yr−1 during the 1960s and through 1986–1995. Despite international concerns about Amazon deforestation emissions, 72% of Brazil's carbon emissions during the period actually came from deforestation in the Atlantic Forest and Cerrado biomes. Brazil's carbon emissions from land use change are about 11 times larger than its emissions from fossil fuel burning, although only about 18.1% of the native biomass has been lost due to agricultural expansion, which is similar to the global mean (17.7%).