International policy commitments highlight the importance of balancing agricultural development with conservation of tropical forest landscapes for climate change mitigation (UNFCCC, 2015), biodiversity conservation (CBD, 2010), and generally sustainable development trajectories (UN, 2015). The Amazon basin has over the last decades become one of the major producer and exporter regions of agricultural commodities (Macedo et al., 2012) at the expense of rampant deforestation (Nepstad et al., 2014; Soares-Filho et al., 2006).
Cracking Brazil's Forest Code
Roughly 53% of Brazil's native vegetation occurs on private properties. Native forests and savannahs on these lands store 105 ± 21 GtCO2e (billion tons of CO2 equivalents) and play a vital role in maintaining a broad range of ecosystem services (1). Sound...