SHORT REPORT Achieving low‐carbon cattle ranching in the Amazon: ‘Pasture sudden death’ as a window of opportunity Marraiane A. Silva 1 | Mendelson Lima 1 | Carlos A. Silva Junior 1 | Gerlane M. Costa 1 | Carlos A. Peres 2 1 Faculdade de Ciências Biológicas e Agrárias, Universidade do Estado de Mato Grosso (UNEMAT), Alta Floresta, CEP 78.580‐000, Brazil 2 Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Conservation, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR 47TJ, UK Correspondence Mendelson Lima, Universidade do Estado de Mato Grosso, Alta Floresta, Campus I, Rod. MT 208, KM 147, Jardim Tropical, Mato Grosso, Brazil. Email: mendelson@unemat.br Funding information Brazilian Ministry of Education and CAPES (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior) Abstract Livestock farming is the key sector that can most contribute to low‐carbon agriculture in the Amazon, the region of Brazil that stands most to gain from land‐use intensifica- tion and most to lose from further primary habitat loss. Cattle pastures affected by the ‘sudden death’ syndrome, which has decimated exotic grass pastures across seven Amazonian states, have forced cattle ranchers to begin renewing their grazing lands. Vast areas of pasture die‐off create an opportunity to catalyse livestock intensifica- tion through public policies. More productive livestock husbandry results in avoided deforestation, mitigation of methane emissions from enteric digestion, and the release of vast previously deforested areas to either more intensive agriculture or forest res- toration. This, however, comes with a cautionary note as the much debated promising paradigm of agricultural intensification remains largely untested as a land‐sparing strategy across the humid tropics. Well‐designed government subsidies will, there- fore, be required to ensure that thousands of landowners can take advantage of this opportunity with minimal environmental side effects. KEYWORDS avoided deforestation, GHG, livestock, methane emissions, pasture degradation 1 | INTRODUCTION Forests and savannahs have been relentlessly converted by humans worldwide as ever larger wildland areas are converted to make room for cropland and grazing land expansion. At a global scale, livestock farming is by far the most powerful agent of climate forcing due to land‐use change, accounting for 18% of all current global anthropo- genic emissions (Steinfeld et al., 2006). In 2014, ruminant livestock accounted for 97.1 million tons of methane (CH 4 ) emissions world- wide, or 47–54% of all non‐CO 2 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the agricultural sector (Dangal et al., 2017). The greatest contem- porary global challenge in agriculture, and the livestock sector in particular, is how to feed a more affluent and growing human popula- tion—fueled by rapidly expanding global markets for agricultural com- modities (Lambin & Meyfroidt, 2011)—without inducing further conversion of primary habitats into anthropogenic grazing land, thereby reducing the sector's contribution as a leading driver of climate change. This challenge becomes even more difficult in devel- oping countries that have jurisdiction over vast tracts of tropical for- est, such as Brazil, where deforestation and other land‐use change are the most important contributors to GHG emissions. Brazil leads the world in beef exports and cattle‐induced CH 4 emissions, which accounted for 56.4% of all CO 2 eq emissions from the agricultural sec- tor and 15.4% of Brazilian emissions from all sources in 2015 (SEEG, 2017). Furthermore, approximately 80% of all deforestation in Brazil- ian Legal Amazonia since 1988 (~42.8 million hectares; hereafter Mha; INPE, 2018) resulted from forest and wooded savannah (Cerrado) conversion into cattle pastures, making livestock the leading engine of deforestation. This aggregate area accounts for more than a third of all ~170 Mha of pastures throughout Brazil. Added to which, CH 4 is a key byproduct of bovine enteric fermentation and is more powerful than CO 2 as a GHG. These facts render bovine beef produc- tion, which will continue to govern the dynamics of land‐use change, the single most important agricultural driver of climate change. Received: 23 October 2017 Revised: 4 June 2018 Accepted: 21 June 2018 DOI: 10.1002/ldr.3087 Land Degrad Dev. 2018;29:3535–3543. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ldr 3535