Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística

About the publication - 2000-2020 Physical accounting - Brazil

The effects of economic activities on the environment has been a concern in the last decades. In spite of the comprehensive scope of the summary economic indicators produced at the international level, the debate now is about the benefits obtained from nature, from which the economic activities and human well-being depend on, are not being properly measured with the methodologies consolidated ever since. These discussions resulted in the System of environmental-economic accounting 2012: central framework manual, SEEA-CF, of the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), which aims at complementing the Systems of National Accounts developed by the countries, by introducing accounting principles to the environmental information, so as to allow a combined analysis of these elements in a single structure.

As part of its program of environmental-economic accounting, the IBGE offers, in this study, a reflection on the physical accounting of the Environmental-Economic Accounts for Land in Brazil, considering the dynamics of the occupation of the territory and its changes along the period between 2000 and 2020.

The publication is organized into three sections. The first one, Technical notes, discusses some referentials from which this reflection is based, contextualizes the investigation of land accounting in other countries, describes the directives that guided the development of this study in Brazil and details its major methodological aspects. The second section, Analysis of the results, discusses the matrix of changes in land use and cover in Brazil, reviews the conversions considered relevant in this accounting period, at regional scale, highlighting the occupation patterns, both the recent ones and some historical ones. In order to complement such reflections, it outlines the major land characteristics of the agricultural establishments in Brazil, based on a cross analysis of the IBGE´s statistics, providing a transversal view of geospatial and economic aspects of the agricultural dynamics. The third section, Final considerations, summarizes the major observations on the occupation conversions and land use in Brazil resulting from this study, as well as it assesses aspects of the scenario glimpsed in the scope of the environmental accounting. In the end of the publication, a glossary gathers the concepts considered key to understand the results.

It is expected that this study, coupled with other studies developed in the scope of the System of Environmental-Economic Accounts (SEEA), also available on the IBGE portal, contributes to a more comprehensive knowledge of the Brazilian reality, as well as to the formulation and execution of public policies towards an environmentally-sustainable and economically-efficient management of the Brazilian environmental assets.