Escolhas Chair: article analyzes the effectiveness of the law against burning sugarcane plantations in São Paulo

In 2002, the São Paulo state government implemented Law 11241, with the intention of gradually banning the practice of straw burning during the sugarcane pre-harvest by 2031. But is this reduction actually happening in practice? The answer is “yes”, according to the article “Pre-harvest sugarcane burning: a statistical analysis of the environmental impacts of regulatory change in the energy sector”, recently published by Escolhas Chair scholar Fernanda Valente and co-authored by Márcio Poletti Laurin, PhD in Statistics from IMECC-Unicamp, researcher and professor at FEA-RP USP.

“We use a model that is already well-known, but we combine the structural decomposition of statistics with the use of spatial modeling. We have other papers published that use the same model to evaluate climate events. My research project for the Instituto Escolhas, which is currently being finalized, explores the use of this model to study various climate events, such as the fires in the Amazon and the Pantanal wetlands,” says the doctoral student, who is leaving to Scotland in November to complete part of her doctoral course at the University of Edinburgh.

According to the article, the analyses show a trend towards a consistent reduction in the occurrence of forest fires, “suggesting the efficiency of the mitigation actions implemented in the state of São Paulo, and indicating a permanent advance in the environmental sustainability of this form of renewable energy production”.

 

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