Brazil's Amazon deforestation hits lowest level since 2019, but five trees still fall every second

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell last year to its lowest level since 2019, with the total area of native vegetation lost across the country dropping below one million hectares for the first time since records began, according to a report published Wednesday by the MapBiomas monitoring network.

The numbers behind the decline

South America's largest country lost 985,000 hectares of native vegetation in 2025, a reduction of 20.6 percent compared to the previous year. In the Amazon rainforest alone, deforestation slowed by 23.5 percent. The reduction was recorded across all six of Brazil's major ecosystems, though the Cerrado savanna south of the Amazon remained the hardest-hit biome, accounting for more than half of all vegetation loss in the country.

We are seeing an increase in enforcement actions and sanctions which have a direct correlation with the drop in deforestation in all Brazilian biomes.

Enforcement drives the turnaround

MapBiomas technical coordinator Marcos Rosa told AFP that 65 percent of areas where the network identified vegetation loss alerts were subject to concrete actions by authorities in 2025, up from 54 percent in 2024 and just 5 percent in 2019, the first year of far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro's term. The figures are a political asset for leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who is seeking a fourth term in October elections and has made fighting deforestation a central goal of his administration. Lula has pledged to eradicate illegal deforestation entirely by 2030.

Agriculture remains the overwhelming driver

MapBiomas, a consortium of universities, NGOs, and technology companies, attributed 99 percent of vegetation loss to agricultural expansion. The data notably does not include forest lost to fires, though after a record fire season in 2024, Brazil was relatively spared major infernos in 2025.

The scale of what remains

Despite the improvement, the rate of destruction remains breathtaking. In the Amazon, the world's largest rainforest, five trees are still felled every second. Preserving forest cover is considered essential to tackling climate change, as trees act as a natural carbon sink, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Political headwinds and the Cerrado pressure

Lula is keen to showcase his environmental achievements ahead of the election, having hosted the COP30 climate summit in the Amazonian city of Belem last year. However, he has faced criticism from environmentalists for his support of a massive oil exploration project near the mouth of the Amazon River. Meanwhile, some defenders of the environment are concerned about the approval last week by the Chamber of Deputies of laws that they say weaken controls meant to curb deforestation.