For most of the last decade, news from the Amazon was a chronicle of loss.
Millions of acres burned or cleared each year. Indigenous territories invaded. International outcry that seemed to change little. Under Brazil's previous government, deforestation had surged to its worst levels in fifteen years — a trajectory that scientists warned was pushing parts of the Amazon toward a tipping point of irreversible die-off.
That trajectory has reversed.
In July 2025, Brazil reported that Amazon deforestation had fallen to 5,796 square kilometres for the preceding twelve months — an 11% decrease from the year before, and the lowest annual rate since 2014. The turnaround, remarkable in itself, appears to be accelerating. Satellite data covering August 2025 to January 2026 shows the lowest forest clearing detected during that interval since record-keeping began.
Brazil's government is now projecting that 2026 could produce the lowest Amazon deforestation rate in the country's modern history — since records began in 1988.
What changed?
When President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in January 2023, he made the Amazon a centrepiece of his presidency. The administration reactivated the PPCDAm — Brazil's Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Amazon — which had been effectively dormant under his predecessor. Environmental enforcement agencies that had been defunded or sidelined were restored. A new Ministry of Indigenous Peoples was created, giving legal weight to the rights of communities most directly affected by forest destruction.
Critically, enforcement became real. Illegal mining operations were expelled from indigenous territories. Land grabbers faced actual legal consequences. Environmental agencies could do their jobs.
The Cerrado savanna — Brazil's other great ecosystem, and one that has received far less international attention — also showed improvement, with deforestation reaching its lowest rate in five to six years.
None of this is permanent. Brazil's agricultural lobby remains powerful. Global commodity markets still provide incentives to clear land. Climate change is making the forest itself more vulnerable to fire. And the political situation could shift.
But what is happening now, in the Amazon, is real. And it matters.
The forest that regulates rainfall across an entire continent. The ecosystem that holds ten percent of Earth's land-based biodiversity. The carbon store that the world depends on — it is still here, and it is growing again.
Fifty years of environmental science told us this was possible. Brazil is proving it. 🌿