Disentangling the Distant Impacts of US Midwestern Drought on Land Change in Brazil

Keywords: telecoupling, metacoupling, land change, natural disasters, remote sensing, biodiversity, agriculture, spatial analysis
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Brazilian soybean production has increasingly led to land conversion in the Cerrado, the world’s most biodiverse tropical savanna. Brazil is the leading global exporter of soybeans, followed closely by the US. The US Midwest (US-MW) alone produces over 80% of domestic soybeans, however, climate change impacts could threaten production across this region. Domestic and international reports stated the major 2012 US-MW drought caused soybean expansion and production increases in Brazil, yet the mechanisms linking these two phenomena have not been fully addressed. Moreover, the impact of regional disasters on distant-yet-connected systems are traditionally viewed from either an intra-national or global perspective. Therefore, this work will investigate the link between 2012 US-MW drought and land change in the Cerrado driven by distant, yet coupled, ecologic and economic processes.

We hypothesize the cascading consequences of US drought significantly contributed to Cerrado land change. The US drought reduced the amount of soybeans produced and exported, and increased the global market price, which could have provided an economic incentive for Brazil to increase production and potentially convert more tropical savanna into soybean fields.

To this end, we quantified the framework of telecoupling (ecological-socioeconomic interactions over distances) by combining market commodity data with remotely sensed imagery and land change data. We sought to determine the extent to which soybean production and prices were impacted by a strong period of US drought, and, consequently, how these impacts have influenced land change in the Cerrado.