Holly Gibbs

University of Wisconsin–Madison | UW · Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies

A regional approach to the study of Brazil's beef industry is increasingly relevant as deforestation takes centre stage in policy debates worldwide. To what extent has beef production expanded toward regions hosting sensitive ecosystems such as the Amazon? Important data limitations remain to answer this question, especially regarding slaughterhous...

Transitioning to a sustainable energy system poses a massive challenge to communities, nations, and the global economy in the next decade and beyond. A growing portfolio of satellite data products is available to support this transition. Satellite data complement other information sources to provide a more complete picture of the global energy syst...

Cattle production inside Brazil’s protected areas (PAs), including indigenous lands, continues to contaminate Amazonian supply chains more than a decade after efforts to reform the sector were launched with the signing of the zerodeforestation cattle agreements (CAs). During 2013–2018, nearly 1.1 million cattle head were sold directly from private...

The cattle industry in the Brazilian Amazon causes vast deforestation while producing at only one-third of the sustainable capacity. Slaughtering cattle at a younger age directly increases production per hectare per year, all else equal, and provides a potential path for sustainable intensification. Here we show that slaughter age is decreasing in...

Taheripour et al. recently posted comments on their websites about our peer-reviewed study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Lark et al. 2022). We found Taheripour et al.’s conclusions to be unsupported and based upon several misunderstandings and misinterpretations of our methods and results. To help clarify, we wro...

Significance Biofuels are included in many proposed strategies to reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and limit the magnitude of global warming. The US Renewable Fuel Standard is the world’s largest existing biofuel program, yet despite its prominence, there has been limited empirical assessment of the program’s environmental outcomes. Ev...

A dietary shift from animal-based foods to plant-based foods in high-income nations could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from direct agricultural production and increase carbon sequestration if resulting spared land was restored to its antecedent natural vegetation. We estimate this double effect by simulating the adoption of the EAT–Lancet planet...

Data on irrigation patterns and trends at field-level detail across broad extents are vital for assessing and managing limited water resources. Until recently, there has been a scarcity of comprehensive, consistent, and frequent irrigation maps for the US. Here we present the new Landsat-based Irrigation Dataset (LANID), which is comprised of 30 m...

In response to global concern about recent fires, Brazil placed a 120-day moratorium on burning in the Amazon in 2020. We assessed how the cattle sector was linked to these fires by estimating the number of cattle properties involved with fires despite the moratorium, and their roles in cattle supply chains. We examined the land cover prior to the...

In their recent contribution, Scully et al (2021 Environ. Res. Lett. 16 043001) review and revise past life cycle assessments of corn-grain ethanol's carbon (C) intensity to suggest that a current 'central best estimate' is considerably less than all prior estimates. Their conclusion emerges from selection and recombination of sector-specific green...

Brazil’s zero-deforestation Cattle Agreements (CAs) have influenced the supply chain but their impact on deforestation has been limited in part because slaughterhouses monitor deforestation only on the properties they buy from directly. Consequently, deforestation continues to enter the supply chain indirectly from properties that are not monitored...

Data on irrigation patterns and trends at field-level detail across broad extents is vital for assessing and managing limited water resources. Until recently, there has been a scarcity of comprehensive, consistent, and frequent irrigation maps for the U.S. Here we present the new Landsat-based Irrigation Dataset (LANID), which is comprised of 30-m...

We examine two potential economic benefits of environmental policy, increased agricultural investment and productivity. This is important because if these benefits are realized, environmental policy could optimize land use for food production while minimizing the negative environmental impacts. We employ multiple empirical techniques to analyze a m...

Scully et al [1] in their recent contribution review and revise past life cycle assessments (LCAs) of corn-grain ethanol’s carbon (C) intensity to suggest that a current ‘central best estimate’ is considerably less than all prior estimates. Their conclusion emerges from selection and recombination of sector-specific greenhouse gas emission predicti...

Brazilian Amazon despite ongoing efforts by the public and private sectors to combat it. The complexity of the cattle supply chain, which we describe in depth here, creates challenges for the landmark Zero-Deforestation Cattle Agreements in particular and for enforcement of deforestation policies in general. Here, we present a holistic analysis tha...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Cropland Data Layer (CDL) is a 30 m resolution crop-specific land cover map produced annually to assess crops and cropland area across the conterminous United States. Despite its prominent use and value for monitoring agricultural land use/land cover (LULC), there remains substantial uncertainty surroundi...

Brazil’s Amazon Soy Moratorium (ASM) contributed to overall reductions in Amazon deforestation since its implementation in 2006. Under the ASM, the Amazon soy sector maintains access to the growing share of the market that operates under zero-deforestation commitments. The ASM has been criticized as unfair to law-abiding producers. Only 1% of the a...

The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil has emerged as the leading sustainability certification system to tackle socioenvironmental issues associated with the oil palm industry. However, the effectiveness of certification by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil in achieving its socioeconomic objectives remains uncertain. We evaluate the impact of...

Several payments for environmental services (PES) schemes to promote large-scale afforestation are currently operational in New Zealand. In addition, the country has the only national greenhouse gas (GHG) Emissions Trading Scheme centred on forest carbon credits in the world. These market-based instruments are paramount in promoting the changes in...

Between 2004 and 2012, multiple policies contributed to one of the great conservation successes of the twenty-first century—an 84% decrease in the rate of Brazilian Amazon deforestation. Among the most prominent of these policies is the Amazon Soy Moratorium (ASM), an agreement by grain traders not to purchase soy grown on recently deforested land....

Recent expansion of croplands in the United States has caused widespread conversion of grasslands and other ecosystems with largely unknown consequences for agricultural production and the environment. Here we assess annual land use change 2008-16 and its impacts on crop yields and wildlife habitat. We find that croplands have expanded at a rate of...

Global attention to the role of cattle production in Amazon deforestation led to the development of new public and private-sector supply chain policies designed to control deforestation in Brazil. These zero-deforestation Cattle Agreements (hereafter, CA) are between meatpacking companies and Greenpeace and other nongovernmental organizations, as w...

In the increasingly polarized international political arena, it has become difficult to find common ground to solve Brazil's ongoing environmental crisis, which has global as well as local implications. International buyers of Brazil's agricultural commodities have raised concerns about products that are contaminated by deforestation (i.e., defores...

Remotely sensed biomass carbon density maps are widely used for myriad scientific and policy applications, but all remain limited in scope. They often only represent a single vegetation type and rarely account for carbon stocks in belowground biomass. To date, no global product integrates these disparate estimates into an all-encompassing map at a...

Avoiding catastrophic climate change requires rapid decarbonization and improved ecosystem stewardship. To achieve the latter, ecosystems should be prioritized by responsiveness to direct, localized action and the magnitude and recoverability of their carbon stores. Here, we show that a range of ecosystems contain ‘irrecoverable carbon’ that is vul...

Integrated high-resolution maps of carbon stocks and biodiversity that identify areas of potential co-benefits for climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation can help facilitate the implementation of global climate and biodiversity commitments at local levels. However, the multi-dimensional nature of biodiversity presents a major chall...

This dataset provides temporally consistent and harmonized global maps of aboveground and belowground biomass carbon density for the year 2010 at a 300-m spatial resolution. The aboveground biomass map integrates land-cover specific, remotely sensed maps of woody, grassland, cropland, and tundra biomass. Input maps were amassed from the published l...

Since 2013, clearing rates have rapidly increased in the Amazon and Cerrado biomes. This acceleration has raised questions about the efficacy of current regional public and private conservation policies that seek to promote agricultural production while conserving remnants of natural vegetation. In this study, we assessed conservation and agricultu...

The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) has emerged as the world’s largest sustainability standard to tackle social and environmental issues associated with the oil palm industry. To date, however, the effectiveness of RSPO certification remains uncertain, especially for socio-economic objectives. Here we evaluate the impact of certification...

The Cerrado biome is Brazil's breadbasket and a major provider of ecosystem services, though these dual roles are increasingly at odds, in part because there are few mechanisms to protect remaining vegetation from large‐scale agricultural expansion. We assessed Cerrado conversion to soy using over 580,000 property boundaries, covering 77% of the bi...

Accurate and timely information on the distribution of irrigated croplands is crucial to research on agriculture, water availability, land use, and climate change. While agricultural land use has been well characterized, less attention has been paid specifically to croplands that are irrigated, in part due to the difficulty in mapping and distingui...

Systems of intensive animal farming, such as the confinement of beef cattle, are widespread in the developed world. Such practices have been under scrutiny since the 1960s for animal welfare and pollution issues. Here, we document the expansion of intensive beef farming to the Brazilian Amazon in order to assess socio-environmental implications. Us...

The state of Mato Grosso is Brazil’s agribusiness powerhouse with a cattle herd of 30.2 million head in 2017. With land use patterns heavily influenced by beef production, which requires substantial land inputs, the state is a key target for environmental conservation. Yet the spatial and temporal dynamics of slaughterhouses in Mato Grosso remain l...

Maximum pasture area and 15,000 random points, 2000–2016. Pastures include all pixels classified as ‘pastures’ or ‘pastures or agriculture’ by [54] or [55] at any year between 2000 and 2016. (DOCX)

Counts and age of plants and CNPJs, 2016. - Sources: [58]; company registry (CNPJ), Empresômetro; Sintegra; Taxpayer Central Registry; Ministry of Agriculture (see S1 Table for more details on sources). (DOCX)

Cattle slaughter records, Indea-MT. (DOCX)

A. Portuguese abstract. B. Data access. (DOCX)

Data attributes and sources. (DOCX)

Cumulative frequencies of average distance to three nearest slaughterhouses, 2000–2016. Cattle densities (head per hectare of pasture) are calculated from [32] and the maximum pasture area in each municipality. Pastures include all pixels classified as ‘pastures’ and ‘pastures or agriculture’ by [54] or [55]. For seven plants with a closing date bu...

After decades of decline, croplands are once again expanding across the United States. A 11 recent spatially explicit analysis mapped nearly three million hectares of US cropland expansion 12 that occurred between 2008 and 2012. Land use change (LUC) of this sort can be a major source 13 of anthropogenic carbon (C) emissions, though the effects of...

Brazil’s largest meatpacking companies lead the world in beef production. Prior to international expansion starting in 2005, the cattle slaughter industry spread from the country’s coastal areas to the interior, where cattle herds were also expanding. Slaughterhouses play a central role in coordinating supply chains, yet current knowledge of the in...

slgBRp.csv Last update:Jan 30, 2019 This dataset contains slaughterhouses of Brazilian Amazon, Cerrado and Pantanal biomes. It was built up by crossing data from multiple sources and contains geographical and historical data of beef production plants, which can be used for economic and environmental analysis. Unit of observation: Slaughtering pl...

Zero-deforestation commitments are a type of voluntary sustainability initiative that companies adopt to signal their intention to reduce or eliminate deforestation associated with commodities that they produce, trade, and/or sell. Because each company defines its own zero-deforestation commitment goals and implementation mechanisms, commitment con...

Brazil is the second largest soybean producer in the world with a planted area in the crop year 2017/18 of 33.347 million hectares, distributed in the Pampa, Atlantic Forest, Cerrado, and Amazon biomes. Through remote sensing techniques we show that the new agricultural frontier of soy is no longer in the Amazon, but in the last continuous areas of...

Unplowed native grasslands are among the most endangered ecosystems in the world, due in large part to their agricultural suitability and widespread conversion to cropland. Despite this, remaining locations of these species- and carbon-rich landscapes are neither well monitored nor effectively protected. A recent spike in US prices for corn ( Zea m...

The state of Mato Grosso is Brazil’s agribusiness powerhouse with a cattle herd of 30.2 million heads in 2017. With land use patterns heavily influenced by beef production, which requires substantial land inputs, the state is a key target for environmental conservation. Yet the spatial and temporal dynamics of slaughterhouses in Mato Grosso remain...

Historically, the expansion of soy plantations has been a major driver of land-use/cover change (LUCC) in Brazil. While a series of recent public actions and supply-chain commitments reportedly curbed the replacement of forests by soy, the expansion of the agricultural commodity still poses a considerable threat to the Amazonian and Cerrado biomes....

Roundtables for sustainable beef have evolved in national contexts as well as at the global level as a multi-stakeholder process to address sustainability concerns in the cattle sector. However, due to their relatively recent inception, the literature on the beef roundtables is extremely limited and very little scholarly work has traced their proce...

Intensive animal farming practices are widespread in OECD countries and growing above average in China, Mexico and Argentina. In the beef industry, systems of livestock confinement have been under scrutiny since at least the 1960s due to animal welfare as well as local pollution and waste issues. Here we document the expansion of intensive beef far...

A major reduction in global deforestation is needed to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss. Recent private sector commitments aim to eliminate deforestation from a company’s operations or supply chain, but they fall short on several fronts. Company pledges vary in the degree to which they include time-bound interventions with clear defini...

Significance Demand for agricultural commodities is the leading driver of tropical deforestation. Many corporations have pledged to eliminate forest loss from their supply chains by purchasing only certified “sustainable” products. To evaluate whether certification fulfills such pledges, we applied statistical analyses to satellite-based estimates...

Supply chain interventions, which include certification schemes and zero-deforestation commitments that aim to produce environmentally and socially beneficial outcomes, are increasingly common, but evidence of their efficacy is scarce. We quantified avoided deforestation from Brazil's zero-deforestation cattle agreements by exploiting variation in...