Protecting the Amazon rainforest and making it an engine of sustainable economic growth, rather than plundering its resources, would bring Brazil billions of dollars in the coming decades, a study found Tuesday.
By expanding sustainable industries and transitioning to low-carbon agriculture, the Amazon region could lead the way in turning Brazil into a green-economy powerhouse, adding 40 billion reais ($8.4 billion) a year to the national economy by 2050, the report said.
A collaboration between the Brazil office of environmental group World Resources Institute (WRI) and the think tank Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, the study modeled several scenarios for the economic future of the world's biggest rainforest, from business-as-usual to a best-case of zero deforestation and green growth.
It found the latter would not only protect one of the planet's vital carbon sinks, but also make for good economics, creating an additional 312,000 jobs in the next three decades while saving or restoring an estimated 810,000 square kilometers (313,000 square miles) of forest -- an area bigger than Pakistan.
"This study shows that making the Amazon a priority would benefit all Brazilians," said economist Rafael Feltran-Barbieri of WRI Brasil, one of more than 100 authors who contributed to the study.
"This model, which would make the Amazon the catalyst of decarbonizing the entire Brazilian economy, is without a doubt the biggest economic and social development opportunity in the country's modern history," he said in a statement.
Based on econometric techniques and models developed by various research groups in Brazil, the study found 83 percent of the demand for cattle, crops, wood and other low-value-added products from the Brazilian Amazon -- the main forces driving deforestation -- was from outside the region.
The region meanwhile has a trade deficit of 114 billion reais per year with the rest of Brazil and the world, it found.
It said major investment -- an additional 2.56 trillion reais by 2050 -- was needed to turn that model on its head, transitioning to a high-productivity, high-employment, high-value-added economy.
The cost of inaction would be more than double that, in damages from extreme weather events and other climate change impacts, it said.
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