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).
Comment on “The Incidence of Fire in Amazonian Forests with Implications for REDD”
Aragão and Shimabukuro (Reports, 4 June 2010, p. 1275) reported that fires increase in agricultural frontiers even as deforestation decreases and concluded that these fires lead to unaccounted carbon emissions under the United Nations climate treaty's tropical...
