Including Carbon Emissions from Deforestation in the Carbon Footprint of Brazilian Beef
Journal article, 2011

Effects of land use changes are starting to be included in estimates of life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, so-called carbon footprints (CFs), from food production. Their omission can lead to serious underestimates, particularly for meat. Here we estimate emissions from the conversion of forest to pasture in the Legal Amazon Region (LAR) of Brazil and present a model to distribute the emissions from deforestation over products and time subsequent to the land use change. Expansion of cattle ranching for beef production is a major cause of deforestation in the LAR. The carbon footprint of beef produced on newly deforested land is estimated at more than 700 kg CO2-equivalents per kg carcass weight if direct land use emissions are annualized over 20 years. This is orders of magnitude larger than the figure for beef production on established pasture on non-deforested land. While Brazilian beef exports have originated mainly from areas outside the LAR, i.e. from regions not subject to recent deforestation, we argue that increased production for export has been the key driver of the pasture expansion and deforestation in the LAR during the past decade and this should be reflected in the carbon footprint attributed to beef exports. We conclude that carbon footprint standards must include the more extended effects of land use changes to avoid giving misleading information to policy makers, retailers, and consumers.

greenhouse gases

expansion

consequences

biofuels

forest

cerrado

land-use change

amazon basin

history

Author

Christel Cederberg

SIK – the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology

Martin Persson

University of Gothenburg

Chalmers, Energy and Environment, Physical Resource Theory

K. Neovius

Karolinska Institutet

Sverker Molander

Chalmers, Energy and Environment, Environmental Systems Analysis

Roland Clift

University of Surrey

Environmental Science & Technology

0013-936X (ISSN) 1520-5851 (eISSN)

Vol. 45 5 1773-1779

Driving Forces

Sustainable development

Areas of Advance

Energy

Subject Categories

Economics

Other Environmental Engineering

DOI

10.1021/es103240z

More information

Latest update

8/24/2018