Access the main highlights of the Pasture 7 Collection
In the last two decades, pastureland has grown by 40% in the Amazon. In the same period, this type of land cover has decreased substantially in the Atlantic Forest (28%) and the Cerrado (10%), where 10.2 million hectares have been transformed into temporary crops. The advance of pastures over the Amazon has put it at the top of the list of biomes with the largest area, in percentage terms, with 36%. The Cerrado (31%), Atlantic Forest (18%), Caatinga (12%) and Pantanal (2%) follow. With the exception of Minas Gerais, with 19.3 million hectares, the other two leading states in terms of pasture area in Brazil are in the Legal Amazon: Pará (21.1 million hectares) and Mato Grosso (20.2 million hectares).
The data is part of an unprecedented mapping by MapBiomas that was presented on Wednesday, November 30, by the On YouTube. He reveals that the main use of Brazilian land continues to be pasture: of all the deforested area in Brazil, which is already close to 35% of the national territory, approximately 90% has been or continues to be pasture. With a presence in all six biomes, it currently occupies around 151 million hectares from the north to the south of the country. But the total area may be even greater because this figure does not include part of the natural grasslands, mainly in the Pampa and Pantanal, which cover 12 million hectares in the country, and areas of mosaic use, where it is not possible to separate agriculture and pasture (or they occur in consortium), and which cover 42 million hectares.
From the analysis of satellite images, it is possible to identify an intense dynamic regarding pasture areas in Brazil, marked by moments of territorial expansion and retraction. Between 1990 and 2000, 46.4 million hectares of natural and man-made areas were converted to pasture, mainly in the Amazon and Cerrado biomes, while 19.2 million hectares of pasture areas were converted to other uses or abandoned, notably in the Cerrado and Atlantic Forest biomes. Between 2000 and 2021, natural and man-made areas transformed into pastures totaled 47.1 million hectares and, once again, the Amazon and Cerrado were the main targets of conversion. But the conversion or abandonment of pastures in this same period more than doubled compared to the previous two decades: 44.7 million hectares, mainly in the Cerrado and Atlantic Forest biomes.
Between 1985 and 2021, agriculture and livestock gained 85 million hectares - an increase of 47%. Agricultural activities grew in five of Brazil's six biomes, with the exception of the Atlantic Forest.
Brazilian pastures store more than six gigatons of carbo
For the first time, MapBiomas Collection 7 provides estimates of soil carbon stocks associated with pasture areas in Brazil. Considering pastures throughout Brazil (cultivated and native), the total stock of organic carbon in the soil is 6.43±1.79 gigatons. Specifically for the Cerrado biome, the recovery of around 28 million hectares of pastures with some level of degradation could result in a gain of approximately 6% in soil carbon stocks by 2030.
Considering average carbon stocks (tons per hectare), these vary from 44 to 22 tons per hectare for the topsoil (0 to 20 cm) in the (native) pasture areas of the Pampa and Pantanal, respectively. For the other biomes - Atlantic Forest, Amazon, Caatinga and Cerrado - these stocks are around 41, 39, 36 and 33 tons per hectare, respectively.
"Recovering degraded pastures and adopting good management practices represents a real win-win situation. The producer wins by increasing herd productivity. And the country wins, given the greater potential of well-managed pastures to sequester carbon, helping to reduce emissions and make livestock farming, as a whole, more sustainable," says Laerte Ferreira, professor at the Federal University of Goiás and general coordinator of the pasture mapping.