Rare wildlife in Brazil’s savannah is under threat — we are all responsible
By Jonny Hughes, CEO of WCMC, UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), and Neil Burgess, Chief Scientist at UNEP-WCMC.
After the Amazon rainforest, the most extensive biome in Brazil is the Cerrado, a vast forested and semi-open savannah covering one fifth of the country. The Cerrado is of global conservation significance, containing around 5% of plant and animal species ever recorded, about 4,800 of which are found nowhere else on Earth. It is the most diverse and endemic-rich savannah ecosystem on the planet. Yet, the Cerrado is also an ecosystem under enormous pressure from conversion of natural habitat to agriculture, in particular for the production of beef and soy.
New research, led by Stockholm Environment Institute at the University of York in collaboration with scientists from UNEP-WCMC and others, sought to uncover the complex relationship between the countries where soy is consumed, the companies that trade the soy, and ongoing and habitat and wildlife declines in the Cerrado. The aim of the study was to explore how biodiversity loss from agricultural commodity production is linked to globalised supply chains.
The researchers’ hope was that by understanding how rising demand from consumer countries is driving habitat loss across the world, buyers and investors will be empowered to make more informed decisions that improve the sustainability of their supply chains and reduce pressure on important biomes such as the Cerrado. Soy was chosen as a commodity for this study because Brazil is one of the world’s largest growers and exporters of soy, which is often “embedded” within a range of other food products due to its widespread use as a source of protein in animal feed.
Results presented in this paper are alarming. Some 86% of the losses in the range of the giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla) occurring in Mato Grosso state are being driven by the consumption of soy and foods containing embedded soy. Whilst some of the consumption of these products is happening in Brazil itself, the majority takes place in countries far distant from the Cerrado, with a large proportion traced to the European Union and China. In European markets, the products driving loss of biodiversity in the Cerrado are varied, but meat derived from livestock is particularly important with 30% of impact linked to soy-fed pork, chicken and lamb, while soy-fed beef accounts for around 10–12% of impact.
Another species which calls the Cerrado its home is the rare Kaempfer’s woodpecker, believed extinct until 2006. Its population is now estimated at a precarious 6,000 individuals. These birds need high-quality Cerrado woodland habitat with open gallery forest, riparian vegetation, babaçu palms and the bamboo Guadua paniculata, upon which they forage for ants. As a Cerrado specialist, Kaempfer’s woodpecker is even more vulnerable to habitat conversion for soy plantations than more generalist species like the giant anteater. Conversion of even small patches of high quality habitat for soy, driven by consumption across the other side of the world, could see this charismatic woodpecker becoming extinct unless responsibility and action is taken at both ends of the trade chain.
This study has broken new ground by linking international commodity trades to fine-scale assessments of habitat loss and biodiversity impacts. They estimate, for example that, between 2000 and 2010, 33% of soy’s impacts on endemic Cerrado species were in Goiás state, which covers only 16% of the biome, and of the 41 traders exporting soy from Goiás in 2011, the top 10 account for over 90% of soy exports. This is a step towards the creation of a powerful standardized measure of embedded biodiversity loss within agriculture derived products being used in consuming countries.
Understanding these complex local to international linkages of soy production, trade and trade pathways at this higher resolution might now begin to help governments and business make more environmentally conscious decisions. Ultimately the goal is to use this type of knowledge to create truly sustainable trade models where there is transparency and accountability right through agricultural commodity supply chains from the growers to the consumers.
UNEP-WCMC and other partners will build on this work through our new Trade, Development and the Environment Hub, funded by the UK Research and Innovation Global Challenges Research Fund (UKRI GCRF). In the coming years we will be working with over 50 partner organisations from 15 different countries — aiming to help make sustainable trade a positive force in the world.
