Sustainability dynamics of the Brazilian MATOPIBA region between 1990-2018: Impacts of agribusiness expansion

Abstract

MATOPIBA is a Brazilian region with 73.2 million ha that has been facing a change in its land use due to agribusiness expansion over the last thirty years. The sustainability-related issues of this land use change raise doubts since it may result in advantages and/or disadvantages for social, economic and environmental aspects. This work assess the sustainability of MATOPIBA by means of a sustainability assessment procedure for operations and production processes (SUAPRO), covering the period 1990–2018 by including both the phases before and after agribusiness expansion. Expressed by the sector sustainability indicator (SSI) from SUAPRO, results show that MATOPIBA's sustainability macroeconomic and social (as the provider function) sectors are increasing along years, while environmental and social (as the receiver function) sectors are worsening. Focusing on MATOPIBA's overall sustainability, the sustainability synthetic indicator of system (SSIS) showed the worst performance for 2000 (4.71) and the best one for 2010 (3.63), while 1990 and 2018 obtained intermediary SSIS values of 4.17 and 4.51. The obtained pulsing behavior for SSIS does not support a conclusion about whether MATOPIBA's overall sustainability is increasing or even decreasing over time, claiming for future efforts to include additional data after 2018 year. Notwithstanding, there is a potential to achieve the maximized SSIS of 1.65 whether the identified actions for improvement were implemented. Besides providing subsidies for decision makers towards a more sustainable MATOPIBA, this work innovates by using nightlights satellite images as a proxy in obtaining data for modelling the SUAPRO.