Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell last year to its lowest level since 2019, according to a report from the MapBiomas monitoring network.
The findings are “good news” for President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva who made the “fight against deforestation” a “central tenet” of his reign, said France24. But how good is the news overall?
Breathtaking destruction
South America’s biggest country lost 985,000 hectares (2.4 million acres) of native vegetation in 2025, down 20.6% from 2024, the report found. Deforestation in the Amazon alone fell by 23.5%, while reductions were recorded across Brazil’s six major ecosystems.
“Even so”, said France24, the “rate of destruction” remains “breathtaking”. In the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest, five trees are still chopped down every second.
The “hardest-hit” biome last year was once again the Cerrado, a “vast, biodiverse savanna” south of the Amazon, which accounted for more than half of the deforestation.
The Amazon is the largest tropical rainforest on the planet and it absorbs more than a billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping to offset the effects of human-caused emissions. But agriculture, wildfire, logging and mining are stripping it of its powers. Agriculture accounted for 99% of vegetation loss across the country.
If deforestation and global warming “continue unchecked”, the Amazon could “begin a gradual transition” to a “degraded, grassland-like ecosystem” in “just a few decades”, said the New York Times.
The “consequences” of an “Amazon tipping point” are “catastrophic for the entire planet,” Bernardo M. Flores, an ecology researcher at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain told the broadsheet, so “we need to be careful not to get anywhere near those risks”.
Reality on the ground
Part of the problem with protection is the region is the chasm between theory and reality. A “protected area” may “exist in law” and “appear on maps, in international pledges, and in official counts of how much of Brazil is under protection”, said Mongabay.
But “on the ground” the reality depends on “staff, fuel, boats, radios, boundary markers, fire brigades, monitoring, community work”, and “the ability to respond when illegal miners, loggers, poachers, or land-grabbers arrive”.
Brazil has created of the world’s “most important protected-area systems”, but the most federal protected areas are still underfunded, with the largest shortfalls in the Amazon.
The Amazon’s protected areas are “expensive to manage” because “many are vast” and “some are difficult to reach”, so a field visit can “require a river journey, a flight, or both” and enforcement could involve “long patrols” with a single manager “responsible for an area larger than some countries”.