By Lucas Guaraldo
Increasing agricultural productivity and protecting crops requires expanding conserved areas and integrating them into productive landscapes—not through deforestation, warned André Guimarães, executive director of IPAM (Amazon Environmental Research Institute) and Special Civil Society Envoy for COP30, during the“2026 World AgriFood Innovation Conference.”
Held on Tuesday afternoon (the 15th), China time, the panel “The Role of Regenerative Agriculture in Climate Resilience” was organized by IPAM, ICV (Instituto Centro de Vida), The World We Want, CAU (China Agricultural University), and Eccon Environmental Solutions, bringing together representatives of Brazilian civil society and researchers from Chinese institutions and universities focused on sustainable production and territorial development.
“This paradigm of clearing nature to make way for cropland needs to be rethought. There is a very strong connection between farmland and the forest, and we can see this simply by observing the height of the plants and the quality of the soil as we approach a forest fragment within a rural property. To produce more, we don’t need to clear more land, but rather redesign our productive landscapes,” argued Guimarães, who presented data on the interaction between farmland and forests collected by researchers from GALO (Global Assessment from Local Observations), a project of the institute, at the Tanguro Research Station in Mato Grosso.
The study also found that for every degree that the average temperature on a farm increases, soybean yields drop by 6% and corn yields by 8%. On the farms analyzed by the researchers, this results in losses of about 20% even before accounting for warming caused by climate change or phenomena such as El Niño.
“In short, we need more forests in agricultural systems. Forests protect crops against heat waves, droughts, and crop failures. Without them, the air becomes drier because there is less water available in the system, and temperatures rise, which directly affects the productivity of Brazil’s main export commodities,” adds Guimarães.
The event is part of a series of initiatives in China that will include the participation of IPAM representatives. From September 6 to 12, Gabriela Savian, the institute’s director of Public Policy, participated in an exchange focused on forest restoration organized by the World Bank. During the event, participants were able to share their countries’ experiences in landscape restoration and learn about the methodologies and concepts that have guided Chinese environmental policies in recent decades.