Brazil Launches New Regulations on Agricultural Climate Risk Zoning

Agricultural Areas to Be Classified by Climate Risk Levels Based on Management Standards

On July 9, 2025, Brazil's Ministry of Agriculture (Mapa) issued Normative Instruction No. 2, formally establishing the "Zarc Management Level Classification" (ZarcNM) system. This system aims to classify agricultural land according to farming practices and integrate it into the Agricultural Climate Risk Zoning (Zarc) framework. Farmland management levels are divided into four grades (NM1 to NM4) through 6 indicators (such as soil calcium content, no-till farming years, and crop diversity), in order to identify regions that adopt more sustainable management methods. The classification data will be entered into the "Management Level Information System" (SINM) developed by the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), which will be collected and operated by certified users (such as agricultural technology institutions, financial institutions, and cooperatives). In the first phase, it will be applied to a soybean pilot project in Paraná State and incorporated into agricultural insurance subsidy policies in 2025/2026 — the higher the management level, the higher the premium subsidy, with a maximum of 35%. The project, developed by Embrapa, has received funding support of 8 million Brazilian reals.