Deforestation risk assessment tool hits 11,000 searches in first three months

BVRio’s new free soy production map and tool for assessing deforestation and conversion of native vegetation at the farm level for production areas in the Brazilian Cerrado region, has seen over 11,000 searches conducted in its first three months, by 1,400 unique users. 

“The speed at which this tool has been used is fantastic, and shows just how important barrier-free access to this information was. Over the coming year we will be updating the data with new deforestation alerts and developing a report function so users can download the information they find as a PDF ” BVRio Director, Grace Blackham.

The tool covers over 92,000 farms, an area of over 61 million ha, and with only a farm CAR Number, users can quickly and easily see if there are any deforestation indicators associated with farms in their supply chain. Farms themselves can also access the free tool in order to provide data to their buyers. An estimated 52.4 million tonnes of soy is produced annually in the Cerrado, 43% of Brazil’s total production.

New legislation in the EU will soon require that commodities such as soy are not placed or made available on the EU market, or exported from the EU, unless they are deforestation-free after a cut-off date of 31st December 2020 and have been produced in accordance with the relevant legislation of the country of production. While the regulation initially only includes forests, thereby excluding much of the Cerrado, it is widely expected that ‘other forested land’ will be included in the first update, and that this will bring the Cerrado under the regulation. Commodities will need to be traced from the farm they are produced on using polygons with sufficient latitude and longitude points to describe the perimeter of the area. 

The free to use tool is available via https://soja.bvrio.org/ and does not require a log-in or registration to use.