Marilia Capellaro Ferreira, Ruth Ascencio Monreal and Livia Ignácio
Bonsucro Limited, Unit KP.CC3.01, Canterbury Court, 1-3 Brixton Road, London SW9 6DE, United Kingdom; marilia@bonsucro.com, ruth@bonsucro.com, livia@bonsucro.com
Climate change has affected the sugarcane sector, and in some regions, significant changes in sugarcane yields have been recorded. Global warming and increased heat are leading to health risks for workers. As determined by the United Nations, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that governmental agreements have settled a maximum 1.5°C level with greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction nearly halved by 2030 and dropped to net zero by 2050. Every sector, including sugarcane farming, needs to play its part in this effort. The Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) has launched its Forest, Land, and Agriculture Guidance (FLAG), including various commodity pathways. However, sugarcane was not covered in the FLAG. Bonsucro is the leading sustainability platform in the sugarcane sector and supports sector-wide efforts to reduce emissions, so it designed a ClimateCane Tracker tool explicitly for sugarcane. It follows the SBTi guidance, and has been developed to help Bonsucro members define their climate targets and lead the way to a net-zero, climate-resilient future for this important crop. The tool allows sugarcane mills and farms and their supply chain to set a clear target and pathway to reduce GHG emissions in sugarcane farming. This covers emissions up to the farm gate, including land-management emissions, land-use change emissions, and removals (carbon sequestration in soils). The tool generates targets for absolute and intensity reductions (t CO2eq per tonne of sugarcane). The generated graphs show year by year the reduction pathway in the short and long-term (up to 2050) from a base year until the target year, along with a possible production growth.