Anthropic Action Effects Caused by Soybean Farmers in a Watershed of Tocantins—Brazil and Its Connections with Climate Change

Abstract

This chapter presents the design and development of an Environmental Sustainability Index for the Evaluation of Environmental Agricultural Sustainability (impacts from anthropic action) applied to the Brazilian agricultural production Soybean monoculture area. The Agricultural Sustainability Index (ISAGRI) aims to express the degree of environmental sustainability of any agricultural production system, regardless of the system being of organic or conventional production. As such, it was designed to contain a minimum set of representative indicators of the quality of soil and water, of degradation and of measures compatible with sustainability. These indicators are useful both to compare the degree of sustainability of production systems, watersheds and regions, and to evaluate in any of these dimensions, its evolution over time. The ISAGRI employs mainly quantitative data, being a result of the aggregation of sub-indexes and indicators and it consists of a numerical value. This is because a high degree of comparability, as it proposes, is necessarily linked to the use of numerical data. The indicators part of these indexes were grouped into three dimensions named: Pressure—characterization of the environmental degradation caused by its use; State—identification of environmental quality and of natural resources and Response—measures taken for preservation of environmental quality. For a better comprehension of the circumstances under review, four alternative scenarios were proposed, preceded by some hypotheses, where the parameters that characterize each of them are: changing the type of planting, land use and used area or a combination of the above (planting and area). From these numbers, which are significant, it remains very clear the need for strict compliance with the environmental law that deals with forest reserve, including the restrictions to soil slopes, as well as the use of no-tillage.