Researchers Look Into Local Climate Impacts of Expanded Sugarcane Cultivations for Biofuels in Brazil

Brazil is a major producer of biofuel ethanol (second to the United States), using sugarcane as the dominant feedstock. The expansion of land-use change for the cultivation of sugarcane is most likely to have major impacts on climate change; however, these impacts are not yet fully understood. Scientists from Stanford University and University of Montana (United States) attempted to obtain insights into these impacts by quantifying climate effects of sugarcane expansion in the Brazilian Cerrado. This area is reported to be a vast savannah (south of the Amazon basin), where large agricultural areas have been increasingly converted to sugarcane plantations for biofuel production.

The bioenergy website (URL above) gives highlights of their methodology as follows: "Using maps and data from hundreds of satellite images, the researchers calculated the temperature, the amount of water given off and how much light was reflected rather than absorbed for each of the different types of vegetation." Their results showed that sugarcane reduced the local temperature by an average of 0.93 degrees Celsius (1.67 degrees Fahrenheit), compared to land cultivated with other annual crops. The expansion of sugar cane into existing crop and pasture land has been found to have a "direct local cooling effect that reinforces the indirect climate benefits of this land-use option".

The full study is is published in the journal, Nature Climate Change (URL) above.