From NDC to Pathways: Translating Brazil’s AFOLU Climate Commitments into Scenarios with the FABLE Calculator

The process of transition scenarios design and the construction of policy narratives based on them are often criticized for lacking proper participation of key stakeholders. For the AFOLU sectors, deep transformations face challenges from sociopolitical dynamics which are often underrepresented in scenario design. Further, integrated assessment models lack transparency due to highly complex structures and opaque assumptions that limit their credibility with key stakeholder groups with power to implement the changes needed. The FABLE Calculator was developed to address these criticisms and to enable broad participation of non-technical users. Developed by the FABLE consortium, it is a user-friendly Excel-based tool that links food demand, agricultural production, land-use change, trade, and sustainability indicators to greenhouse gas emissions in five-year steps from 2000 to 2050. It allows for designing and running agriculture and land use scenarios for climate change mitigation such as those exploring outcomes of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to the Paris Agreement. This study uses the FABLE calculator, applying a Brazil-adapted version with multiple adjustments to reflect national data and policy context, to support Brazil’s alignment of short- and medium-term climate actions with long-term strategies (LTS) and climate-neutrality objectives. The approach translates Brazil’s updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), with a focus on Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU), into quantitative pathways using the FABLE Calculator. 

The study combines (i) the development and systematic validation of the model  with Brazilian national datasets to enhance transparency, acceptability and policy relevance; (ii) Brazil-specific spatial downscaling to explore the territorial implications of pathway assumptions and identify potential feasibility constraints, and (iii) a structured translation of the AFOLU NDC components of Brazil’s NDC into explicit scenario levers, such as deforestation limits, restoration trajectories, agricultural productivity, land livestock and demand assumptions to create NDC-consistent pathways. Both the model development and scenario design is informed and validated by stakeholder-oriented processes designed to obtain context-specific evidence, challenge unrealistic parameter choices, and facilitate bi-directional feedback between SSH-informed insights and model structures. The research systematically documents stakeholder responses to modellers’ choices and explores how they align or disagree, and why. Results will inform future studies and provide useful information for the broader modelling community engaged in land use scenario design for Brazil and elsewhere. The study will draw from past workshops already conducted with Brazilian stakeholders and two more scheduled for the first months of 2026.

This research demonstrates how the integration of participatory and empirical inputs into scenario design and validation advances interdisciplinary practice and procedural justice in policy-relevant scenario research. As a result, it enhances the realism, transparency, and acceptability of land-use and climate pathways in decision-making processes for a major Global South agricultural exporter such as Brazil, which is also the most biodiverse country in the world and home to the largest remaining area of primary tropical rainforest .

This work is supported by FCT, I.P./MCTES through national funds (PIDDAC): LA/P/0068/2020 - https://doi.org/10.54499/LA/P/0068/2020 , UID/50019/2025,  https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/PRR/50019/2025, UID/PRR2/50019/2025. This work is also supported by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection.