Area of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest
A study tracking 35 years of vegetation data from the Amazon to the Cerrado over seven presidencies shows how Brazil’s top political leadership can dramatically slow down or speed up the loss of tropical forests and savannas.
'Brazil has shown the world that deforestation can be dramatically reduced when there is the political will to act. But that progress is fragile...'. Vinicius Tonetti.
A University of Cambridge-led analysis of maps made from satellite imagery covering over three decades and seven presidents shows how the winner of Brazil’s national elections since 1990 directly affected the preservation of its globally vital ecosystems.
The study reveals a rollercoaster of habitat loss rates across presidencies in the country's three largest biomes – the Amazon, Cerrado, and Atlantic Forest – from a peak of 3.62 million hectares of native vegetation vanishing annually under Itamar Franco in the nineties, to a low of just 1.21 million hectares a year under Temer a decade ago.
Researchers found that the Amazon lost an average of around 994,000 hectares annually during the first three years of Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva's current presidency, compared with 1.4 million hectares a year under his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.
This represents a reduction of about 29% in the average annual area of Amazon lost under Lula’s return compared with Bolsonaro’s time in office, according to the study, published in Environmental Research Communications.
However, in the Cerrado, the vast tropical savannas of central Brazil, the trend moved in the opposite direction. Annual habitat losses averaged around 1.28 million hectares between 2023 and 2025, an increase of around 50% compared with 854,000 hectares per year under Bolsonaro, during whose presidency savanna loss accelerated.
The Cerrado, a vital source of water that feeds many of Brazil’s rivers, has seen major increases in commercial farming of crops such as soybean, as US-China trade tensions during Trump’s first term saw China pivot to Brazilian soybean.
Read the whole article on the Univerisity of Cambridge website:
The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.