Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon reached its lowest level since 2019 last year and the deforested area across the country fell below one million hectares for the first time, according to a report published Wednesday, May 27.
These data collected by the reference monitoring network MapBiomas are good news for left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who must seek re-election in October and has made environmental preservation one of his priorities.
Lula has notably committed to eradicating illegal deforestation in the largest country in Latin America by 2030. The stakes are high: plant cover is essential to absorb carbon dioxide and slow global warming.
According to the MapBiomas report, nearly 985,000 hectares were deforested in 2025, a reduction of 20.6% compared to the previous year. This is the lowest surface area since Mapbiomas surveys began in 2019.
“We have seen an increase in control and sanctions (…) which have a direct relationship with the decline in deforestation in all Brazilian biomes,” declared Marcos Rosa, technical coordinator of this monitoring network.
According to him, 65% of areas where MapBiomas identified vegetation loss alerts were the subject of concrete actions by the authorities in 2025, compared to 54% in 2024 and only 5% in 2019, the first year of the mandate of ex-far-right president Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022).
Expansion agricole
MapBiomas, which brings together universities, NGOs and technology companies, attributes almost all vegetation loss to agricultural expansion (99% of the area affected in 2025). The data does not take into account the area of forest lost due to fires.
In the Amazon, the largest tropical forest on the planet, the area deforested last year fell by 23.5% compared to 2024, to around 290,000 hectares, the lowest since records began. Despite this significant reduction, this equates to “about five trees per second,” according to the MapBiomas report.
The most affected biome was again the Cerrado, a vast savannah rich in diversity located south of the Amazon, which concentrated more than half of the 2025 deforestation in Brazil, despite a reduction of 16.9% over one year. More than 84% of the area deforested last year is in the Amazon or the Cerrado.
Despite these encouraging figures, environmental defenders are concerned about the approval last week by the Chamber of Deputies of laws which, according to them, weaken the controls supposed to stem deforestation. These laws, initiated by the powerful agro-business lobby in Parliament, must still be approved by the Senate.
Lula is keen to display a good environmental record five months before the election during which he hopes to obtain a fourth term, after a first stint as president from 2003 to 2010. The Brazilian president has, however, been criticized by environmentalists for his support for a vast oil exploration project off the coast of the Amazon.
