Increasing global demand for food and the need to address climate change risk make it ever more urgent to both protect ecosystems and use land more productively and efficiently. Brazil is a key player in this context and has made significant gains in recent decades.
This report is the first OECD review of Brazil’s environmental performance.
Increasing agricultural productivity can have ambiguous effects on forest protection in theory: it can expand the scope of farming, which is detrimental to the forest, but it can also induce farmers to intensify their production.
Annual deforestation rates in Brazil’s Amazon fell by almost 80% between 2004 and 2012 due in large part to conservation policies Brazil introduced in 2004.
Agriculture and the agro-processing sector in Brazil have shown impressive growth over the past two decades. This has largely been driven by productivity improvements and structural adjustment resulting from broad economic reforms, as well as new technologies developed by agricultural science.
Urban sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Brazilian cities are growing. At the national level, the dominance of greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation in Brazil masks the fact that emissions from other sectors, like Energy, Transport and Waste, are growing quite rapidly in cities.