Degraded pastures in Brazil: improving livestock production and forest restoration.

Degraded pasture is a major liability in Brazilian agriculture, but restoration and recovery efforts could turn this area into a new frontier to both agricultural yield expansion and forest restoration. Currently, rural properties with larger degraded pasture areas are associated with higher levels of technical inefficiency in Brazil. The recovery of 12 million ha of degraded pastures could generate an additional production of 17.

[The impact of climate change on leishmaniasis in Brazil].

This paper sought to assess how climate change will affect the proliferation of leishmaniasis in Brazil in three time frames: 2010-2039, 2040-2079 and 2080-2100, and with two climate change scenarios. The relation of temperature, precipitation and the number of hospital admissions due to leishmaniasis was estimated and projections were made using these results. Results show that precipitation has a strong relation with leishmaniasis incidence and projections show that by the end of the twenty-first century there will be a 15% growth in the annual number of hospital admissions due to leishmaniasis in Brazil, compared to the base scenario (1992-2002).