Meeting ambitious restoration targets in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest

According to the World Wildlife Fund, Brazil’s Atlantic Forest once covered over 142 million hectares, but human activity has destroyed almost 90% of it, making it one of the most endangered biomes in the world, with much of the forest left today being highly fragmented.

The study, published in Environmental Research Letters, was led by Yara Shennan-Farpón from King’s College London with colleagues from Oxford University’s Nature-based Solutions Initiative, IIASA, and the University of São Paulo, Brazil. The team set out to compare various restoration policy options and their effects on cropland, pastureland, and biodiversity in Brazil, whose economy is heavily dependent on agriculture.

“Globally, ambitious targets to restore forests are met with the challenge of an increasing demand for land for food production. Our study simulates different policies to assess their potential to meet such targets for restoring Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, a global biodiversity hotspot, which has degraded over the years,” explains Shennan-Farpón.

Brazil’s Native Vegetation Protection Law, also known as the Forest Code, mandates that farms must restore or protect native vegetation to cover 20% of their land in this biome. However, the legislation was amended in 2012 to exempt small landowners from this rule. The study finds that effective implementation of the Forest Code could potentially result in 4.8 million hectares restored in the Atlantic Forest alone, and 12.5 million hectares in all of Brazil.

Using the implementation of the Forest Code as the baseline scenario, three other restoration policy scenarios were tested: first, simulating restoration on all farms, including small farms (removing the existing exemption); second, imposing restoration targets based on restoring native vegetation within biodiversity priority areas; and third, simulating the most ambitious target of restoring 15 million hectares by 2050, as set by the Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact, which requires both removing the exemption for smallholders and targeting priority areas for biodiversity.

The authors highlight that supporting smallholder farmers to restore native vegetation on their land could double the amount of restoration in the Atlantic Forest, but it would still fall short of the ambitious target of restoring 15 million hectares in the Atlantic Forest by 2050 if restoration was only driven by existing regulations. According to the study’s modeling approach, the target of restoring these 15 million hectares can only be achieved if, in addition to supporting smallholders to restore their land, additional restoration priority areas for biodiversity are considered that go beyond the requirement of the Forest Code. This could enable the restoration of 15.5 million hectares within the Atlantic Forest and 34.6 million hectares across Brazil.

“Our study considers ambitious native vegetation restoration targets that go beyond current policies by focusing on biodiversity and support for smallholders. We conclude that ambitious restoration targets for the biome can be achieved alongside agricultural expansion if mechanisms specifically designed to support smallholders are created,” notes study coauthor Aline Soterroni, a guest researcher at IIASA and Research Fellow in the Nature-based Solutions Initiative at the University of Oxford.

Piero Visconti, Principal Research Scholar at IIASA and senior author of the study adds, “Systematically planned restoration areas that identify priorities based on ecological knowledge and conservation needs are essential to achieve positive conservation outcomes. Both the extent of area restored, and the habitat gain for terrestrial vertebrates, several of which are critically threatened with extinction, can triple compared to the baseline scenario, if restoration areas are identified through ecologically informed restoration prioritization methods.”

The results show that all restoration policy options, including implementing the existing Forest Code, will require trade-offs for agriculture, biodiversity, and rural livelihoods. These trade-offs could be mitigated if meat and bio-energy crops production to meet domestic and foreign projected demand will be less than that expected in the IPCC ‘middle-of-the-road’ Shared Socioeconomic Pathway scenario (SSP2). This scenario projects an increase of 60-98% percent in livestock consumption globally, which is not environmentally sustainable. The findings also emphasize that more sustainable and efficient agricultural production – especially in cattle ranching practices – will be required to meet large-scale ecosystem restoration.

To make space for restoration, more intensive livestock farming practices are adopted under all modeled scenarios, allowing for raising more livestock in a smaller area.  

“To maximize ecosystem restoration, it will be critical to reduce meat and dairy product demand and better cattle ranching practices that lead to sustainable intensification,” notes Visconti.

"This work moves us closer to considering the trade-offs involved in large-scale forest restoration initiatives in Brazil's Atlantic Forest. It's really important that fair solutions are identified for supporting sustainable agricultural development and ensuring smallholders and vulnerable communities also have access to the potential benefits from forest landscape restoration," Shennan-Farpón concludes.

Adapted from a press release prepared by King’s College London.

Reference
Shennan-Farpón, Y., Soterroni, A.C., Scarabello, M., & Visconti, P. (2024). Using policy scenarios to assess challenges and opportunities for reaching restoration targets in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. Environmental Research Letters DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ad5ab2