Crop-driven Land Use Change Assessment and Monitoring for Sourcing Areas

GRAS verifies compliance with different sustainability criteria

GRAS supports companies that need to fulfil sustainability criteria and aim at creating a sustainable supply chain for their agricultural raw material with respect to environmental and social practices of their suppliers.
GRAS conducts a sustainability assessment which includes the analysis of different land use change categories (e.g., deforestation, grassland conversion, tree plantations conversion, others) and the analysis of additional relevant sustainability criteria (e.g., protected areas, carbon stock, social indicators, etc.). GRAS takes this one step forward and focuses the land use change assessment on the presence of a specific crop, narrowing down the scope of the analysis and providing relevant results for the analysed sourcing areas.

The GRAS approach for a crop-driven land use change analysis

To investigate the drivers of land use change and to evaluate the suppliers, GRAS conducts the analysis of crop-driven land use change. The focus is on the expansion of different crops (e.g., sugarcane, palm, soybean, or others) in areas where land use change has occurred. This enables companies to evaluate their suppliers against different land use change criteria and to make the supply chains more sustainable.
GRAS follows a 3 Steps approach for performing the crop-driven land use change analysis, staring from a baseline assessment of the sourcing area and reaching information on the crop-driven land use change (Steps 1, 2 and 3).

GRAS develops monitoring system for the annual land use change

GRAS develops a monitoring system for an annual land use change analysis adjusted to the sourcing areas. The monitoring system can include a baseline mapping and the annual assessment of different land use change types (e.g., deforestation, grassland conversion) for the area of interest. State-of-the art remote sensing technologies and various satellite products are used for the monitoring to achieve the most accurate results.

The monitoring system supports the identification in a timely manner of areas with high environmental risk and of areas with crop-related land use change.