An international research team has found that the way three of the world’s largest emerging economies — Brazil, India and Indonesia — manage their land, rather than what their populations eat, holds the key to drastically cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. That is according to a comparative analysis published in the journal Climate Policy by a team led by Johannes Svensson of the Institut du Développement Durable et Relations Internationales (IDDRI), which finds that the agriculture, forestry, and other land-use sector holds the key to decarbonisation across all three economies.
The finding challenges a widespread assumption that climate progress in the developing world depends on changing diets, with the modelling showing the great majority of emission cuts come instead from how forests are protected and how soil is farmed. Because the three nations rank among the highest emitters worldwide in the land sector, they also represent the single greatest opportunity for climate mitigation.
In Brazil, the approach relies on rapidly halting deforestation and expanding plantation forests, while Indonesia achieves its largest savings by ending the degradation of carbon-rich peatlands and preventing fires. The land use, land-use change and forestry subsector emerged as the most significant driver of mitigation in all three countries.
Meanwhile, in India, the focus moves underground, where raising carbon storage in agricultural land and planting trees on farms could absorb millions of tonnes of emissions. In Brazil and Indonesia, more land will also be given over to biomass, plant material that can be converted into renewable bioenergy to displace fossil fuels.
The researchers built those conclusions on a decarbonisation pathway framework, constructing detailed country-specific models that local experts fed with national economic, agricultural and dietary data. The software then simulated how a range of policy choices would affect everything from crop yields to energy demand over the next three decades.
Because strict cuts to agricultural emissions can harm food security and rural livelihoods, the team concluded that climate policy across the three nations must focus on protecting nature and improving crop efficiency rather than reducing food production. Linking agricultural models with economy-wide simulations allowed the researchers to trace how a new plantation or a change in fertiliser policy would affect a national economy.
The researchers were candid about the limits of their work, noting that the models struggled to predict how worsening droughts, heatwaves and erratic rainfall might damage future crop yields. Because extreme weather is so variable and difficult to capture in economic software, the study assumed relatively stable increases in crop production.
The models also did not account for the broader effects of large-scale land change on local biodiversity, nor did they quantify the jobs in farming likely to be gained or lost. Even so, the authors argue that integrating farm and forest data into economy-wide models keeps the proposed solutions realistic, reducing the risk of triggering food shortages or economic shocks.
These findings come as governments across the developing world weigh how far to push land-sector reform without unsettling rural economies, a question made more pressing by recent research showing global forest loss has continued despite a wider spread of protection and certification schemes.
For more information: Svensson, J. et al. (2024). The AFOLU Sector’s Role in National Decarbonization: A Comparative Analysis of Low-GHG Development Pathways in Brazil, India and Indonesia. Climate Policy, 1–18. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14693062.2024.2391048
