Abstract
The La Plata Basin (LPB) is one of the most important regions for agriculture and livestock production in South America, playing a central role in the world food production and food security. Within its borders is also located the whole Brazilian Pantanal region. Identifying the most important land use sectors in LPB as well as the changes observed in the past years is fundamental to recognize which areas of the basin might be more vulnerable to climate change in order to design adaptation strategies. A general characterization of land use and livestock production of Brazilian LPB was done by using the System of Automatic Retrieving (SIDRA) of Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) platform as the major source of data. It was observed expressive increases in land areas used for temporary crops, such as soybean, sugarcane, and maize, as well as increases in poultry and swine production. These important changes in agricultural land use and livestock production are currently associated to non-climatic drivers, but this dynamic might be strongly affected by the consequences of climate change and variability, with negative socio-economic impacts for the whole region.
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Notes
The years 1996 and 2008 were selected given the availability of data at IBGE platform at the time of the survey for the assessed land use sectors.
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Acknowledgments
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-20013) under Grant Agreement n° 212492: CLARIS LPB. A Europe-South America Network for Climate Change Assessment and Impact Studies in La Plata Basin. The authors also express their gratitude to Pierre Girard, the editor of this special issue of Climatic Change, as well as to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
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This article is part of a Special Issue on “Climate change and adaptation in tropical basins” edited by Pierre Girard, Craig Hutton, and Jean-Phillipe Boulanger.
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de Vasconcelos, A.C.F., Schlindwein, S.L., Lana, M.A. et al. Land use dynamics in Brazilian La Plata Basin and anthropogenic climate change. Climatic Change 127, 73–81 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-014-1081-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-014-1081-8