Sugarcane ethanol: Contributions to climate change - BAFF

Chapter 3
Figure 3. Different land use classes over multispectral (bands 3, 4 and 5) black and white Landsat
images acquired in March of 2003 (date 1), May of 2003 (date 2), and April of 2008 (date 3).
3.2. Measuring the LUC using micro-regional secondary data
�e objective of this method is to analyze the o�cial secondary data about sugarcane and
other agricultural land uses in order to verify how substitution among these uses have taken
place over the last years, in di�erent areas all over Brazil. Knowing how sugarcane expansion
has occurred and how other land uses have behaved is a �rst step to make considerations
about LUC and ILUC caused by ethanol production.
�e analysis developed here was based on the Shi�-share model adapted for the purposes of
this study. �e Shi�-share model looks at the mix of activities and whether they are shi�ing
towards or away from the area being studied (Oliveira et al., 2008).
�e Shi�-share model decomposes the growth area of an agriculture activity in a region
over a given period of time into two components: (1) growth e�ect, which is the part of the
change attributed to the growth rate of the agriculture as a whole; and (2) an agriculture
70 Sugarcane ethanol