RIO DE JANEIRO – Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell in 2025 to its lowest level since 2019, according to a report published on May 27 that will be seen as good news for leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
South America’s biggest country lost 985,000ha of native vegetation in 2025, down 20.6 percent from 2024, the MapBiomas monitoring network announced.
The figure is the lowest since the network began keeping records in 2019.
It notably does not include forest lost to fires, but after a record fire season in 2024, the country was relatively spared major infernos in 2025.
Mr Lula, who is seeking a fourth term in October elections, has made the fight against deforestation a central tenet of his administration.
Preserving forest cover is essential to fighting climate warming as trees act as a natural carbon sink.
After four years of widespread logging under his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, Mr Lula has pledged to eradicate illegal deforestation altogether by 2030.
The reduction in deforestation was noted across Brazil’s six major ecosystems.
“We are seeing an increase in enforcement actions and sanctions (…) which have a direct correlation with the drop in deforestation in all Brazilian biomes,” Mr Marcos Rosa, MapBiomas’s technical coordinator, told AFP.
Even so, the rate of destruction remains breathtaking.
In the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest, where deforestation slowed by 23.5 per cent, five trees are still felled every second.
The hardest-hit biome in 2025 was once again the Cerrado, a vast, biodiverse savanna south of the Amazon.
It alone accounted for more than half of the deforestation.
MapBiomas – a consortium of universities, NGOs and technology companies – said agriculture accounted for 99 per cent of vegetation loss.
Mr Lula is keen to showcase his environmental achievements ahead of the election.
In 2025, he hosted the COP30 climate summit in the Amazonian city of Belem.
He has however been criticised by environmentalists for his support of a massive oil exploration project near the mouth of the Amazon River. AFP