Abstract
The effects of land-use change (LUC) on soil carbon (C) balance has to be taken into account in calculating the CO2 savings attributed to bioenergy crops1,2,3. There have been few direct field measurements that quantify the effects of LUC on soil C for the most common land-use transitions into sugar cane in Brazil, the world’s largest producer 1,2,3. We quantified the C balance for LUC as a net loss (carbon debt) or net gain (carbon credit) in soil C for sugar-cane expansion in Brazil. We sampled 135 field sites to 1 m depth, representing three major LUC scenarios. Our results demonstrate that soil C stocks decrease following LUC from native vegetation and pastures, and increase where cropland is converted to sugar cane. The payback time for the soil C debt was eight years for native vegetation and two to three years for pastures. With an increasing need for biofuels and the potential for Brazil to help meet global demand4, our results will be invaluable for guiding expansion policies of sugar-cane production towards greater sustainability.
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Acknowledgements
We thank São Paulo Research Foundation — FAPESP (2011/ 07105-7), Shell Global Solutions (UK), Brazilian Bioethanol Science and Technology Laboratory — CTBE for financial support. We thank all sugar-cane mills, associations and individual farmers who supported the soil sampling and provided access to field work. We also thank B. Ide and E.C. Reidel for their valuable help in finding the comparison pairs and G. Ferrão for support and fieldwork organization. F.F.C.M. wishes to thank W. Clark, N. Dickson and the Sustainability Science Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, for help and guidance during the writing and analysis process, and CAPES, CNPq and the Italian Ministry for Environment, Land and Sea for the scholarship granted while this research paper was developed.
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F.F.C.M., C.E.P.C., C.C.C. and C.A.D. designed the study and conducted the analyses. S.M.F.M. and K.P. developed the model to determine the LUC factors for sugar cane. All the authors contributed to writing the paper.
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Mello, F., Cerri, C., Davies, C. et al. Payback time for soil carbon and sugar-cane ethanol. Nature Clim Change 4, 605–609 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2239
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2239
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