A new version of the BRLUC (Brazilian Land Use Change) method makes available data on carbon footprint in many agricultural products at city level all across Brazil. The available data are about the process of “Land use change”, which could account for up to 90% of the carbon footprint of these products and which was responsible for approximately 66% of the CO2 emissions in Brazil in 2020. Reporting land use change is required by most international carbon footprint and Lifecycle Assessment protocols, such as the GHG protocol and ISO standards about the theme. Generally, in a given product study, they require the observation of the land use 20 years ago and the difference in the carbon stock between the current use and former ones. For example, if the study aims to check the carbon footprint of any agricultural product, and if the prior land use of the production place was forest or pasture about 20 years ago, it is necessary to account for this difference in carbon stock and the CO2 emissions resulting of this change in the stock. “The carbon stocks of a forest can be up to seven times higher than farmland. Then, if this conversion happened in the period of 20 years, emissions can still be very high”, explains Danilo Garofalo, scholarship holder from Embrapa Environment and first author of the study. “These studies ideally obtain the data on a plot level or farm level, but this is often unviable due to a lack of information or the high costs and time involved. The BRLUC method was developed to satisfy this need and make data on a city level, openly available and in conformity with international protocols”, says Renan Novaes, Embrapa Environment analyst and one of the co-authors of this method. The new method and new emission estimates were published in one of the main journals that deal with Lifecycle Assessment in the world, the Journal of Cleaner Production, which has a high impact factor JCR of 11.0 and is available on this link. The data for the 2000-2019 period also has open access on the Embrapa site at https://brluc.cnpma.embrapa.br/ Besides the Embrapa authors, the work also had the participation of Miguel Brandão, from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, and Julia Zanin Shimbo, from the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (Ipam, in Portuguese) and scientific coordinator of MapBiomas. “Publishing in high impact-factor journals like this one is important to have higher visibility and credibility on the studies, once they go through rigorous peer review processes and scientific criteria”, Brandão affirms. One of the main improvements made on this new version, named BRLUC 2.0, was the use of data of spatially explicit land conversion from MapBiomas; agricultural statistics by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), regional carbon stocks from knowledgeable sources, such as IPCC and national greenhouse gas inventories; and an approach of shared responsibility among farmlands. “With these improvements, emissions will be estimated with a higher accuracy and will be used to replace estimates done internationally with cruder data”, states the researcher Marília Folegatti, from Embrapa Environment. The most recent version of the method calculated an estimate of 911 Mtons of CO2 associated with agriculture, in 2019, 81% of which were related to planted pastures. The rates of emission by land use change in Brazil for sugar cane, corn and soybeans were estimated at 0.3, 2.0 and 2,3 tCO2.ha-1.year-1, respectively. “These new estimates are 97%, 38% and 85% lower than the estimates available in the Blonk consultancy tool and on the GFLI and Agrifootprint databases”, which are examples of data available internationally. “After the paper was published, we saw renewed interest in incorporating our estimates into important international databases”, Marilia remarks. “With the Brazilian government and companies’ growing commitment to carbon reduction targets, such as net-zero targets, this kind of data will be increasingly requested. As the resulting data are consistent with the international protocols, they can be used in these new studies”, Novaes points out. The authors hope that the data will also be used to support corporate supply chain management, aimed at a lower carbon production profile and higher international competitiveness. The study received funding from Embrapa and the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy (MME) and it was co-funded by four associations of the private sector: the Syndicate of Food Industry for Animals (Sindirações), the Brazilian Animal Protein Association (ABPA), the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries (Abiove) and the Brazilian Association of Soybean Producers (Aprosoja). A potential conflict of interest was mitigated by the following actions: independent selection of scholarship holders by the Embrapa team; previous submission of hypotheses, methods and results for scrutiny by independent researchers; paper submission to a high-impact journal with peer review; and not involving the associations in these decisions. The paper's authors are Danilo F. Trovo Garofalo, Renan Milagres L. Novaes, Ricardo A. A. Pazianotto, Vinícius Gonçalves Maciel, and Marília I. S. Folegatti-Matsuura, from Embrapa Environment (Jaguariúna, SP); Miguel Brandão, from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm (Sweden); and Julia Zanin Shimbo, from the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (Ipam). Access the paper in the Journal of Cleaner Production on https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652622021503 Access for BRLUC 2.0: https://brluc.cnpma.embrapa.br/