Optimization Models to Aid the Reduction of Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon: Sustainable Diets and Drone-Based Environmental Emergency Response
Open AccessPreserving the Amazon Rainforest, the world's largest tropical rainforest, is fundamental to achieve the goals outlined in the Paris Agreement. The forest plays a major role in stabilizing local climates, affects global wind and water cycles, and stores and absorbs a non-negligible amount of greenhouse gases. However, over the last decades, the forest has been under intense pressures, seeing unprecedented levels of forest degradation and deforestation.The majority of the Amazon Rainforest is in Brazil, and the country is responsible for a large share of deforestation and degradation in the region. The main causes of deforestation in Brazil are the expansion of the agricultural frontier due to increased demand for animal products, as well as the lack of protection and oversight in protected areas facing environmental threats. In this context, we propose two optimization models to support deforestation reduction in the Amazon Rainforest. We first study the design of sustainable diets in Brazil using a multi-objective optimization model that seeks to find diets meeting four sustainability criteria: cultural acceptability, affordability, nutritional adequacy, and environmental impact. Our model seeks to simultaneously minimize the carbon, water, and environmental dietary footprints while also minimizing the deviation from the mean observed diets. We implement the study for four states in Southeast Brazil and explicitly consider geographic and income-related differences in dietary preferences. We also study the impact of budget constraints on the optimized results. We find that it is possible to achieve nutritionally adequate diets with lower environmental impacts without additional cost requirements even when imposing restrictions on cultural acceptability. The environmental footprints reduction is mostly achieved by reducing animal-products and moving diets that are more plant-based, but no food group is completely removed from the optimal solution.Secondly, we study the design of a drone-based network to support environmental emergency response in the Brazilian Amazon. We propose a novel facility location-allocation problem that explicitly considers backup batteries, multiple emergencies, and different kinds of drones. We find that, when multiple kinds of drones are available, in general, preference is given to drones that can be used in different kinds of missions. We also find that increasing the number of additional batteries considerably reduced the network cost without significant impact on the total response time of the network.
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SilvaCostaCustodio_gwu_0075A_15846.pdf | 2022-04-25 | Open Access |
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