Expansion of eucalyptus energy plantations under a Livestock-Forestry Integration scenario for agroindustries in Western Parana, Brazil

摘要

The increase in the world population has caused a rise in the demand for animal protein, particularly that of swine and poultry. Brazil is among the world's largest producers of these two commodities, with the western region of Parana accounting for a significant fraction of this production. To industrialize this raw material requires a large amount of energy, and much of this demand is supplied by eucalyptus biomass in the form of woodchips originating from distant regions, which increases the cost of production. The Livestock-Forestry Integration (LFI) system, which is encouraged by the national government program of Low Carbon Agriculture (LCA), is a eucalyptus production system that is growing in Brazil. In the Western region of Parana, there is widespread availability of pasture areas which could be used to produce eucalyptus in this type of system, and meet the biomass demand of agroindustries. The objective of this work was to explore the expansion of eucalyptus plantations under an LFI scenario for agroindustries in Western Parana, Brazil. In addition to estimating the area with the potential for expansion of agriculture by means of Landsat-8 satellite images, digital elevation models integrated with the Geographic Information System geoprocessing and the software ArcGIS were used. It was found that conversion of 4.24% of the pasture areas into LFI would meet the current demand for woodchips of the agroindustries that slaughter poultry and swine in Western Parana. Using 8.04% would satisfy the demand until 2025. It was verified that there are 3972.10 km(2) available for expansion of agriculture in the region. The methodology used here serves as a reference for future work.