ID: 60
Presenting Author: Edimilson Rodrigues dos Santos Junior
Status: pending
This study uses remote sensing to map the Cerrado's ecological decay, translating funcational integrity (from planetary boundaries) into actionable data for a safe and just operating space.
The planetary boundaries approach has shown that humanity is increasingly entering a risk zone from which abrupt changes in ecological and social systems may occur. Beyond the severe alteration of planetary systems and the uneven distribution of impacts, impact assessment tools across scales have been inefficient in integrating Earth system criteria into planning and decision-making. In Brazil and several other countries of the Global South, recent advancements in remote sensing and cloud computing have enabled land-use and land-cover change data to serve as key proxies for understanding territorial transformations driven by urbanization, agribusiness expansion, and deforestation. Adapting these data for broader analyses in a bottom-up sense can help bridge this gap, providing massive, accessible information to developers, agencies, and local communities alike. Taking advantage of this context, this study advances the operationalization of the planetary boundaries approach through the lens of functional integrity, one of the most affected dimensions of Earth system stability, focusing on the Cerrado biome. Previous assessments from 1985 to 2023 revealed a widespread decline in ecological functionality, with only a fraction of the biome maintaining high integrity levels - an indication that ecosystem degradation has become systemic and spatially diffuse. Building upon these findings, the present work proposes the use of functional integrity as the basis for a multi-scale baseline capable of supporting integrated impact assessment frameworks. By framing integrity as a boundar
PhD candidate at EESC/USP and Fulbright Visiting Scholar at UMass Amherst (USA). Master's in environmental engineering (EESC/USP, Brazil). Interests include GIS and impact assessment.
Coauthor 1: Luís Luís Fernando Pereira Brito
Coauthor 2: kaline de Mello
Coauthor 3: Timothy Randhir
Coauthor 4: Marcelo Montaño