Research paperBrazil's current and future land balances: Is there residual land for bioenergy production?
Introduction
Demographic changes and economic growth will cause a more than a doubling of world transport capacity over the next half-century and substantially increase demand for fuel, particularly in the developing countries [1]. The combustion engine will continue to be a dominant engine system for many years to come, especially for freight transport. The automotive industry is therefore interested in finding alternative fuels — especially biofuels — for combustion engines.
With demand for liquid biofuel on the world market increasing, Brazil, today's largest producer and consumer of sugarcane ethanol, is considered a major potential supplier of biofuels to the world market. Brazil has large land endowments and technologically advanced sugarcane agro-industries that have been developed since the 1970s. These place Brazil in a leading position to produce biofuels economically, and this implies a substantial potential for mitigating anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Food security and promotion of renewable energy, including modern uses of biomass as a source of energy, are key global goals. This raises the important question as to whether it is possible to integrate these goals into strategies for sustainable land use.
The amount of land resources that can be dedicated to agricultural land expansion for biofuel feedstock production may be limited and needs to be assessed in depth [2]. Doubts have been raised regarding as to whether direct and indirect land use changes can help mitigate GHG emissions [3]. There are also questions about the potential environmental, social and economic impacts of growing biofuels; for example, the competition they pose to the food supply, the risks of reducing biodiversity, the impacts on water availability and quality, and the lack of benefits to those directly affected by large-scale introduction of biofuel production [4].
Brazil is endowed with significant land resources and is a land use change hot spot; these challenges for Brazil thus have both local and global dimensions [5]. Brazilian agriculture covers about one-fourth of the country's territory; it has expanded substantially during recent decades and is expected to expand further in response to the growing demand for food, livestock feed, and liquid biofuel feedstocks [6]. At the same time, safeguarding biodiversity-rich ecosystems and the avoidance of GHG emissions from deforestation and land use change are essential for achieving sustainable land use.
Securing food production involves both meeting the increasing demand locally for a rapidly growing middle class and serving the growing markets for export of agricultural commodities. Brazil is spearheading the development of sugarcane-derived ethanol for the country's growing fleet of flex-fuel vehicles and increasing world market demands. Today the vast majority of liquid biofuel feedstocks, primarily sugarcane for ethanol production, are benefiting from the favorable climatic conditions of Brazil's southeast and central-east regions. Brazilian sugarcane based bioethanol production in 2013 was 28 billion litres [7]. In view of the envisaged expansion of sugarcane, the Brazilian government conducted a study to identify new areas suitable for sugarcane production [8].
Brazil began biodiesel production in 2006 and has since increased its installed production capacity rapidly in response to envisioned mandates. Soybean is by far the most important source for biodiesel production (72%) followed by animal fats (24%) and cotton seeds (2%) [7].
In 2010 the biodiesel use mandate was set at 5%; since November 2014 a 7% mandate has been set. Industry has long requested an increase in the biodiesel blend, as capacity is more than twice the actual production goals. In 2013, 2.9 billion litres of biodiesel transport fuel were sold, supplying 5% of the diesel market in Brazil.
In addition to increased blending mandates, new guidelines have been proposed that favors the production of biofuel feedstock in underutilized or degraded pasture land and rain-fed cropland [2]. Suitability of land for biofuel production strongly depends on local biophysical conditions (climate, soil, terrain) and management regimes (input level, pesticide and weed control, machinery). Regional planning for biofuel feedstock expansion or intensification must account for the spatial (and temporal) variations of biofuel feedstock suitability and productivity in order to maximize energy return effectiveness per land area while minimizing GHG emissions [9].
For these reasons, the large automobile company Daimler AG launched a project in cooperation with the International Institute for Applied System Analysis (IIASA) and the Technical University of Berlin to assess biofuel feedstock production potentials, while taking into account the following sustainability criteria:
The production of biofuels (i) excludes competition with food, livestock feed and fiber supply; (ii) neither directly nor indirectly results in deforestation; (iii) does not encroach in legally protected areas; (iv) does not cause biodiversity loss; (v) does not compete for scarce fresh water resources: (vi) will not cause land degradation and reduces GHG emissions, in spite of increased fertilizer use and/or land use conversion to biofuel feedstocks.
To comply with the first four of these sustainability criteria an important first step is to assess the availability and quality of available land resources in Brazil. Research presented in this paper provides: (i) spatially detailed land balances to identify residual land; (ii) assessments of quality of residual land for agricultural purposes, and (iii) analysis of potential food-fuel competitions in residual land resources.
Section snippets
Overview and approach
To estimate Brazil's residual land areas as accurately as possible we allocate statistically recorded extents of agricultural and forest land to a spatial grid of 30 arc-second (about 1 km2) in accordance with remotely sensed land cover information. The allocation also accounts for built-up land, water bodies, and sparsely vegetated and barren areas. The remainder of the estimated land balance, at the grid-cell level, is designated as residual land. The spatial inventory of residual land was
Land balance and extents of residual land
A land resources database for Brazil was created for a 30 arc-second (about 1 km2) grid-cell resolution comprising land share distributions of seven major land cover categories. Fig. SI-1 presents a comprehensive map showing selected shares of all seven land cover categories. The category “mixed land use” represents grid-cells where none of the seven land cover categories is above 50%. Forest dominates in the north and northeast of Brazil, while crop and pasture land are mainly located in the
Scope and limitation of the study
Results need to be considered in the context of the following scope and limitations:
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One of the challenges has been to deal with existing land cover datasets and their lack of consistency on the location and type of current land use. By comparing results of remote sensing products with Census data, the weaknesses and strengths of individual products became apparent and had to be dealt with using appropriate algorithms developed for this purpose at IIASA.
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The 30 arc-second (about 1 km2) grid-cell
Conclusions
A new land resources database for Brazil was created for a 30 arc-second grid-cell resolution comprising land intensities of major land cover categories consistent with year 2006 census of agricultural statistics at the micro-regional level and FRA 2010 forest areas at biome level. Spatial allocation (“downscaling”) algorithms were applied to obtain spatial distributions of land use categories including a remaining unused share in each grid-cell, termed “residual land” areas.
Residual-III land,
Further research
The focus of a follow-up research is the assessment of production potentials of key biofuel feedstocks on residual-III land. Established feedstocks, in particular sugarcane and soybean, are compared with alternative biofuel feedstocks such as cassava, jatropha, and miscanthus.
Acknowledgment
The authors thank Daimler for the jointly work and Professor Sobral from University of Pernambuco for kindly providing information on available land use data for Brazil. We would like to acknowledge the importance of the funding provided by the Wissenschaftlicher Beirat der Bundesregierung Globale Umweltveränderungen (WBGU), within the scope of the Young Scientist Summer Program (YSSP), organized by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis(IIASA).
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2021, Industrial Crops and ProductsCitation Excerpt :For example, Alkimim et al. (2015), indicates that around 50 Mha of pasture could be released due to intensification of cattle production. Lossau et al. (2015) quantified that after intensification of pastureland productivity, a total of 37 Mha of land that excludes Amazon biome, protected and high biodiversity areas, could be used to expand bioenergy. The expansion of biofuel crops on pastureland can provide some beneficial ecosystem services such as soil carbon sequestration, soil carbon cycling, soil nutrient provision, water regulation and socioeconomic development (Khatiwada et al., 2016a; Oliveira et al., 2019).