Amazon Deforestation in Brazil Drops by 67% from April 2022 to 2023

A 2018 image showing illegal logging on Pirititi indigenous lands in the Amazon rainforest in 2018, located in Mato Grosso. Mato Grosso is one of the states most ravaged by illegal logging and tree burning in Brazil. Image: quapan, CC

News Analysis

When President Lula, as he is more popularly known, campaigned for office against Jair Bolsonaro last year, he vowed to toughen enforcement of laws protecting the Amazon rainforest and other similar forests in Brazil.

According to figures monitored by the Brazilian Institute for Space Studies (INPE), 2019 to 2022, the entire term of Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency, the rate of deforestation rose by 60% over what it had been for the entire four years before that. It mostly seriously affected the states of Pará and Amazonas in northern Brazil and Mato Grosso in the west. In addition, human rights abuses against Brazil's indigenous population skyrocketed as well.

During that time, every means imaginable was used to clear lands in support of the lumber industry, agribusiness, and mining which helped prop up Bolsonaro as the president. Campaign contributions and under the table kickbacks to politicians going to the highest levels encouraged Bolsonaro to look the other way.

It also mattered that Bolsonaro believed the climate crisis was not real. That meant actively encouraging the destruction of these lands, even when their presence used to provide one of the biggest carbon dioxide sinks in the world for the planet, was an acceptable policy.

That human-related activities — supported by the Bolsonaro administration — was the overwhelming cause of mass deforestation was backed up by a study released in November 2022. That analysis also revealed that fire was the means of choice to destroy those forests, with people setting them often paid for by industry and with federal officials ordered to ignore what was happening.

The FAPESP Research Program on Global Climate Change (RPGCC) sponsored that study.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who vowed to fiercely protect those forests should he take office, won the election for president of Brazil on October 30, 2022.

Since Lula took office on January 1, 2023, he has made good on his promise to protect the forests.

According to INPE, for the first four months of the year, deforestation in the Amazon fell from 1,988 square kilometers (768 square miles) in 2022 to 1,173 square kilometers (453 square miles) in 2022. That is a 41% drop.

The change in deforestation for last month compared to the same in 2022 was even more dramatic. While the rainforest lost 1,026 square kilometers (396 square miles) in April of last year, that number fell to just 329 square kilometers (127 square miles) for April 2023. That works out to a 68% reduction in deforestation on a year-to-year basis.

This has all happened thanks to President Lula actively enforcing Brazil's laws to protect the forests from unlawful destruction. He has deployed police and other forces to monitor the illegal destruction happening in those regions, unlike Bolsonaro who many times claimed the stories that people were behind the many fires there had nothing to do with human action.

His crackdowns have also already contributed to a major reduction in illegal mining activities taking place within those areas.

In the process of helping conserve the rainforests, Lula has also helped champion the cause of the Indigenous peoples who call these rainforests home, and share them with the great diversity of life there.