Ana Paula Dutra Aguiar

• PhD
• Researcher at National Institute for Space Research

We present a generic spatially explicit modeling framework to estimate carbon emissions from deforestation (INPE‐EM). The framework incorporates the temporal dynamics related to the deforestation process and accounts for the biophysical and socioeconomic heterogeneity of the region under study. We build an emission model for the Brazilian Amazon co...

Following an intense occupation process that was initiated in the 1960s, deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon have decreased significantly since 2004, stabilizing around 6000km(2) yr(1) in the last 5 years. A convergence of conditions contributed to this, including the creation of protected areas, the use of effective monitoring systems, and...

Response to Folke et al. Transnational corporations and the challenge of biosphere stewardship. Nat. Ecol. Evol. 3, 1396-1401 (2019).

The United Nations 2030 Agenda catalysed the development of global target-seeking sustainability-oriented scenarios representing alternative pathways to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Implementing the SDGs requires connected actions across local, national, regional, and global levels; thus, target-seeking scenarios need to reflect...

With intensifying climate change impacts on dryland regions, it is essential to better understand how actors relate to each other to sustainably manage natural resources. The literature on environmental governance networks has studied actor collaborations, but it is only starting to investigate networks that sustain conflictive situations. Moreover...

Non-technical summary Achieving sustainability on the ground poses a challenge in decoding globally defined goals, such as sustainable development goals, and aligning them with local perspectives and realities. This decoding necessitates the understanding of the multifaceted dimensions of the sustainability challenges in a given context, including...

This paper reports research that is part of a project to combat deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest by developing an online system designed to forecast deforestation risk over the short term, spanning 2 to 4 weeks. This online platform aims to empower stakeholders with timely data, facilitating proactive conservation and intervention s...

The UN sustainable development goals (SDGs) and the Paris climate target require a holistic transformation towards human well-being within planetary boundaries. However, there are growing debates on how to best pursue these targets. Proposed transformation strategies include market- and technology-driven green-growth, shifting towards a sufficiency...

The global demand for agricultural commodities has driven extensive land conversion to agriculture in Brazil, especially in the MATOPIBA region. This area encompasses the Rio Grande Basin, a major tributary of the São Francisco Basin that is known for expanding intensive irrigated agriculture and hydropower generation. However, recent data reveal d...

Este documento apresenta os resultados dos projetos NEXUS e XPaths, focados em dialogar sobre futuros sustentáveis alinhados aos 17 Objetivos do Desenvolvimento Sustentável (ODS) da ONU para 2030. Através de encontros participativos entre outubro de 2021 e agosto de 2022, que reuniram 100 participantes de diversos setores, utilizou-se métodos parti...

In line with its mandate, the IPBES task force on scenarios and models developed a methodological guidance to accompany the foundations of the Nature Futures Framework, a flexible tool to support the development of scenarios and models of desirable futures for people, nature and Mother Earth, welcomed by the IPBES Plenary in decision IPBES-9/1. The...

Este documento sintetiza os primeiros desdobramentos do diálogo participativo promovido nos projetos NEXUS e XPaths para a discussão de futuros sustentáveis, em particular no contexto dos 17 Objetivos do Desenvolvimento Sustentável (ODS) da ONU para 2030. O projeto NEXUS Caatinga e Cerrado se concentra na transição para a sustentabilidade nos bioma...

Tropical deforestation impacts the climate through complex land–atmosphere interactions causing local and regional warming. However, whilst the impacts of deforestation on local temperature are well understood, the regional (nonlocal) response is poorly quantified. Here, we used remote-sensed observations of forest loss and dry season land–surface...

The Amazon biome has experienced significant changes in its landscape, similar to other tropical forests, primarily due to changes in land use in the area. Despite previously established strategies to contain the advance of deforestation, we have observed an increase in deforestation rates recently. Our objective was to analyze deforestation in the...

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include social and ecological goals for humanity. Navigating towards reaching the goals requires the systematic inclusion of perspectives from a diversity of voices. Yet, the development of global sustainability pathways often lacks perspectives from the Global South. To help fill this gap, th...

Unlabelled: To halt further destruction of the biosphere, most people and societies around the globe need to transform their relationships with nature. The internationally agreed vision under the Convention of Biological Diversity-Living in harmony with nature-is that "By 2050, biodiversity is valued, conserved, restored and wisely used, maintaini...

Understanding the cost-effectiveness of restoration initiatives is critical for their successful implementation. In this context, this study presents a new approach to investigating the cost-effectiveness of different forest landscape restoration strategies for achieving multiple restoration goals. The approach is based on an optimization model tha...

In recent years, the area affected by forest degradation in the Brazilian Amazon has frequently been higher than deforestation. From August 2006 to July 2019, the degraded area totaled 194,058 km2, representing almost two times the 99,630 km2 deforested in the same period. The impacts of degradation include biodiversity loss and changes in the carb...

This Report provides a comprehensive, objective, open, transparent, systematic, and rigorous scientific assessment of the state of the Amazon’s ecosystems, current trends, and their implications for the long-term well-being of the region, as well as opportunities and policy relevant options for conservation and sustainable development.

Reaching sustainable and just futures for people and nature requires tackling complex social-ecological challenges across multiple scales, from local to global. Pathways towards such futures are largely driven by people’s decisions and actions, underpinned by multiple types of motivations and values. Thus, understanding the link between potential f...

The future of land use and cover change in Brazil, particularly due to deforestation and forest restoration processes, is critical for the future of global climate and biodiversity, given the richness of its five biomes. These changes in Brazil depend on the interlink between global factors due to its role as one of the main exporters of commoditie...

Anthropogenic transformations, which have become intensified by land use and land cover changes and industrialization, have contributed to increased anthropogenic pressure on biodiversity. These disturbances contribute toward fragmentating habitats at different scales and putting species at risk, in addition to compromising the main biogeochemical...

La degradación de los bosques amazónicos debe incorporarse a la agenda de la COP26 (traducción)

A degradação da floresta amazônica deve ser incorporada à agenda da COP26 (Tradução)

Following the boom of soybean production from 2000 to 2006 in the Santarém region of the Brazilian Amazon, the mechanized agricultural area remained stable, unlike other regions. Deforestation was controlled, but this initial expansion led to the restructuring of the agrarian space in the region. Given this scenario, we aimed to understand the mech...

This Report provides a comprehensive, objective, open, transparent, systematic, and rigorous scientific assessment of the state of the Amazon’s ecosystems, current trends, and their implications for the long-term well-being of the region, as well as opportunities and policy relevant options for conservation and sustainable development.

Free-to-read at: https://rdcu.be/cw7ua; Portuguese and Spanish versions of this paper are provided at: https://github.com/celsohlsj/ngeo_correspondence

To achieve regional and international large-scale restoration goals with minimum costs, several restoration commitments rely on natural regeneration, a passive and inexpensive strategy. However, natural regeneration potential may vary within the landscape, mainly due to its historical context. In this work, we use spatially explicit restoration sce...

The future of land use and cover change in Brazil, in particular due to deforestation and forest restoration processes, is critical for the future of global climate and biodiversity, given the richness of its five biomes. These changes in Brazil depend on the interlink between global factors, due to its role as one of the main exporters of commodit...

Land use and land cover change models and scenarios are essential to understand the interconnections between global and regional factors influencing land use and demand changes, especially if we consider population growth and food demand projections in 2050. Understanding the future of changes in land use and land cover in Brazil is fundamental fo...

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are described as integrated and indivisible, where sustainability challenges must be addressed across sectors and scales to achieve global-level sustainability. However, SDG monitoring mostly focuses on tracking progress at national-levels, for each goal individually. This approach ignores lo...

Global Environmental Assessments (GEAs) are in a unique position to influence environmental decision-making in the context of sustainability challenges. To do this effectively, however, new methods are needed to respond to the needs of decision-makers for a more integrated, contextualized and goal-seeking evaluation of different policies, geared fo...

Forest degradation is widespread around the world, due to multiple factors such as unsustainable logging, agriculture, invasive species, fire, fuelwood gathering, and livestock grazing. In the Brazilian Amazon forest degradation from August 2006 to July 2016 reached 1,1 869 800 ha. The processes of forest degradation are still poorly understood, be...

Humanity is on a deeply unsustainable trajectory. We are exceeding planetary boundaries and unlikely to meet many international sustainable development goals and global environmental targets. Until recently, there was no broadly accepted framework of interventions that could ignite the transformations needed to achieve these desired targets and goa...

The United Nations 2030 Agenda catalysed the development of global target-seeking sustainability-oriented scenarios representing alternative pathways to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Implementing the SDGs requires connected actions across local, national, regional, and global levels; thus, target-seeking scenarios need to reflect...

Tropical secondary forests (SF) play an important role in the global carbon cycle as a major terrestrial carbon sink. Here, we use high‐resolution TerraClass data set for tracking land use activities in the Brazilian Amazon from 2004–2014 to detect spatial patterns and carbon sequestration dynamics of secondary forests (SF). By integrating satellit...

Deforestation and drought are among the greatest environmental pressures on the Amazon rainforest, possibly destabilizing the forest-climate system. Deforestation in the Amazon reduces rainfall regionally, while this deforestation itself has been reported to be facilitated by droughts. Here we quantify the interactions between drought and deforesta...

Roughly 60% of all deforested lands in the Brazilian Amazon are covered with pastures, putting cattle raising in evidence as a major driver of deforestation and also of forests’ regrowth. Still, the role of cattle raising diversity in the landscape dynamics of this region remains poorly understood. To contribute to this discussion, we combined data...

Deforestation and drought are among the greatest environmental pressures on the Amazon rainforest, possibly destabilizing the forest-climate system. Deforestation in the Amazon reduces rainfall regionally, while this deforestation itself has been reported to be facilitated by droughts. Here we quantify the interactions between drought and deforesta...

The viability of the climate pledges made by Brazil at the COP21 in Paris, 2015, heavily depends on the success of the country policies related to forest governance. Particularly, there are high expectations that the enforcement of the Brazilian Forest Code (BFC) will drive large-scale forest recovery and carbon mitigation. In this study, we quanti...

The workshop entitled ‘From visions to scenarios for nature and nature’s contributions to people for the 21st century’ was organized by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) expert group on scenarios and models and its technical support unit, and hosted by the NF-UBC Nereus Program, the Peter Wall Institute f...

The joint and relative effects of future land‐use and climate change on fire occurrence in the Amazon, as well its seasonal variation, are still poorly understood, despite its recognized importance. Using the maximum entropy method (MaxEnt), we combined regional land‐use projections and climatic data from the CMIP5 multimodel ensemble to investigat...

This report assesses all the positive potential benefits digitalization brings to sustainable development for all. It also highlights the potential negative impacts and challenges going forward, particularly for those impacted by the ‘digital divide’ that excludes primarily people left behind during the Industrial Revolution like the billion that g...

Highlights •The dynamics of secondary vegetation and of land-covers related to regeneration were affected by pressure to halt deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. •In a context of decreasing deforestation rates, more secondary vegetation was converted into clean pasture, mechanized agriculture, and palm oil while secondary vegetation and land-co...

HE SECOND AFRICAN DIALOGUE on The World in 2050 (TWI2050) brought together stakeholders to discuss pathways to reach the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), within the planetary boundaries, and through the transformation of African agriculture and food systems. The motivation for the discussion is the understanding that for implementing the SD...

Pathways to reach global goals need on-the-ground ownership to succeed in transforming societies. The UN 2030 Agenda presents shared visions for sustainable and prosperous futures. However, global challenges as manifested by e.g. SDGs as well as the planetary boundaries require adequate and timely responses across several scales: They require trans...

Climate change is expected to impact the hydrological regime worldwide, and land use and land cover change may alter the effects of the former in some cases. Secondary growth in deforested and abandoned areas is one of the main consequences of land use and cover changes in Amazonia. Among land uses, the effects of the secondary growth in water avai...

Tropical carbon emissions are largely derived from direct forest clearing processes. Yet, emissions from drought-induced forest fires are, usually, not included in national-level carbon emission inventories. Here we examine Brazilian Amazon drought impacts on fire incidence and associated forest fire carbon emissions over the period 2003–2015. We s...

In tropical areas, pioneer occupation fronts steer the rapid expansion of deforestation, contributing to carbon emissions. Up-to-date carbon emission estimates covering the long-term development of such frontiers depend on the availability of high spatial–temporal resolution data. In this paper, we provide a detailed assessment of carbon losses fro...

Fires Fires Fires Fires Fires

This article reviews the current status, trends and challenges of land system science in Latin America. We highlight the advances in the conceptualization, analysis and monitoring of land systems. These advances shift from a focus on the relationships between forests and other land uses to include a greater diversity of land cover and land-use type...

The Brazilian Amazon is being affected by the new worldwide geopolitical transformation that is tending towards an integrated global economy. In the region environmental considerations have not been adequately incorporated into long-term land use planning and this failure has partly been due to the complexities of the country’s existing inter-secto...

Deforestation in Amazon is expected to decrease evapotranspiration (ET) and to increase soil moisture and river discharge under prevailing energy-limited conditions. The magnitude and sign of the response of ET to deforestation depend both on the magnitude and regional patterns of land-cover change (LCC), as well as on climate change and CO2 levels...

Deforestation in Amazon is expected to decrease evapotranspiration (ET) and to increase soil moisture and river discharge under prevailing energy-limited conditions. The magnitude and sign of the response of ET to deforestation depend both on the magnitude and regional patterns of land-cover change (LCC), as well as on climate change and CO2 levels...

This research presents estimates of CO2 emission rates from land use change (LUC) in the Caatinga Biome of Rio Grande do Norte, which comprises an area of approximately 53.000 km2. The main objective was to quantify CO2 emissions from LUC, adapting the INPE-EM emission model to the most relevant activities related to LUC in the region from 2000 and...

Este trabalho apresenta a primeira avaliação das taxas de emissões de CO2 oriundas do uso e mudança no uso da terra na Caatinga, único bioma exclusivamente brasileiro que compreende 844,453 km2 de área e está localizado no Nordeste do Brasil. Uma primeira abordagem foi realizada para toda a vegetação de caatinga presente no Estado do Rio Grande do...

A great challenge faced by the Amazon region is to maintain the ecosystem services provided by the pristine forest and its complex ecological processes, as well as the needs of the growing human population in the region, in face of global environmental changes and growing demands for land use. In the present study we analyze two different storyline...

Land cover change in the Neotropics represents one of the major drivers of global environmental change. Several models have been proposed to explore future trajectories of land use and cover change, particularly in the Amazon. Despite the remarkable development of these tools, model results are still surrounded by uncertainties. None of the model p...

As land use change (LUC), including deforestation, is a patchy process, estimating the impact of LUC on carbon emissions requires spatially accurate underlying data on biomass distribution and change. The methods currently adopted to estimate the spatial variation of above- and below-ground biomass in tropical forests, in particular the Brazilian A...

The concept of global ecosystem services has become a powerful paradigm for understanding the link between ecosystem processes and related human activities, which is expressed by the economic and ecological quantification of the services in regards to sustainable development. The role of tropical forests in the global climate system and the uncerta...

Agriculture, deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions and local/regional climate change have been closely intertwined in Brazil. Recent studies show that this relationship has been changing since the mid 2000s, with the burgeoning intensification and commoditization of Brazilian agriculture. On one hand, this accrues considerable environmental divid...

Using agent-based models in large area studies is hard. Since researchers need local data and field knowledge to create empirical models, most ABM studies cover small areas. A great challenge is how the modellers place agents on the landscape (agent placement) and defines its atributes. This paper presents a method and a set of operators to support...

The study estimated, for the first time, the greenhouse gas emissions associated with cattle raising in Brazil, focusing on the period from 2003 to 2008 and the three principal sources: 1) portion of deforestation resulting in pasture establishment and subsequent burning of felled vegetation; 2) pasture burning; and 3) bovine enteric fermentation....

As pasture and cropland have replaced forest cover in the Brazilian Amazon, the creation of spatial explicit time series of land use is an important concern in modeling land change. Despite much progress in mapping deforestation using satellite remotely sensed data, little is known about the distribution of agricultural land uses that replace fores...

A criação de Projetos de Assentamento Agroextrativistas (PAE) visa a regularização fundiária de apossamentos praticados por comunidades tradicionais. Em 2005, foi criado pelo Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária no município de Santarém-PA, o PAE Lago Grande, que com 290.000 hectares e 30.000 habitantes, corresponde a um dos maiores...

The potential impact of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon on greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere calls for policies that take account of changes in forest cover. Although much research has focused on the location and effects of deforestation, little is known about the distribution and reasons for the agricultural uses that replace forest...

Assis, Pedro Valle This work aims to estimate the carbon emissions from tropical deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon associated to the risk assessment of future land use change. The emissions are estimated by incorporating temporal deforestation dynamics, accounting for the biophysical and socioeconomic heterogeneity in the region, as well second...