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Increasing wildfires threaten progress on halting deforestation in Brazilian Amazonia

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 7, pages 1945–1946 (2023)Cite this article

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Sustainably managing the Amazon region is essential to mitigating global climate change and to preserving the biological and cultural diversity of the region. After promising reductions in degradation in the 2010s, a return to historically high levels of land conversion and deforestation during the past 5 years has severely undermined these goals. This land conversion — primarily the result of logging, mining and ranching — has generated social, economic and environmental burdens across scales1. Encouragingly, signs of recovery towards Amazon protection are appearing under Brazil’s current federal administration. But amid the drop in deforestation, a new threat is on the rise: uncontrolled fires.

The TerraBrasilis website of the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE) provides interactive maps of data on deforestation, forest-cover change and active fires across the Amazon and the Cerrado biomes2. It shows, for example, that 2023 has already seen falling deforestation rates — deforestation alerts were 42% lower between January and July than in the same period of 2022. Additionally, major illegal mining operations that threaten the ecosystem and Indigenous communities (particularly in Yanomami territory) are being curtailed3. This decrease in deforestation follows policy and enforcement actions carried out under the Brazilian government since President Lula took the helm in January 2023, most notably the reinstatement of the ‘Action Plan for Preventing and Controlling Deforestation in the Legal Amazon’ (PPCDAm). However, the proximate causes of this decrease remain unclear. Some analysts suggest that a sense of impunity for illegal deforestation that developed under former president Bolsonaro’s administration has been replaced with a fear of sanction — signalled by the reinstatement of the PPCDAm. Others believe the slowdown represents a hiatus in which actors who are responsible for deforestation are assessing the new political landscape.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth Sciences, University of South Alabama, Mobile, AL, USA

    Gabriel de Oliveira

  2. Earth Observation and Geoinformatics Division, National Institute for Space Research, São José dos Campos, Brazil

    Guilherme Mataveli & Yosio E. Shimabukuro

  3. School of Environmental Sciences, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, Norwich Research Park, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

    Guilherme Mataveli & Matthew W. Jones

  4. Department of Forestry, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Scott C. Stark

  5. School of Global Development, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, Norwich Research Park, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

    Rachel Carmenta

  6. Department of Geography and Atmospheric Science, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA

    Nathaniel A. Brunsell

  7. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Federal University of Paraíba, João Pessoa, Brazil

    Celso A. G. Santos

  8. Department of Geography, State University of Mato Grosso, Sinop, Brazil

    Carlos A. da Silva Junior

  9. Department of Environment Sciences, Federal University of Amapá, Macapá, Brazil

    Helenilza F. A. Cunha

  10. Department of Civil Engineering, Federal University of Amapá, Macapá, Brazil

    Alan C. da Cunha

  11. Academic Unit of Atmospheric Sciences, Federal University of Campina Grande, Campina Grande, Brazil

    Carlos A. C. dos Santos

  12. National Academy of Sciences, Board on Environmental Change and Society, Washington, DC, USA

    Hannah Stewart

  13. School of Economics and Political Science, Institute of Management in Latin America, University of St Gallen, St Gallen, Switzerland

    Vanessa Boanada Fuchs

  14. Yale School of the Environment, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Skye Hellenkamp

  15. Physics Department, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

    Paulo Artaxo

  16. Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM), Brasília, Brazil

    Ane A. C. Alencar & Paulo Moutinho

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  1. Gabriel de Oliveira
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  16. Ane A. C. Alencar
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  17. Paulo Moutinho
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  18. Yosio E. Shimabukuro
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Correspondence to Gabriel de Oliveira.

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de Oliveira, G., Mataveli, G., Stark, S.C. et al. Increasing wildfires threaten progress on halting deforestation in Brazilian Amazonia. Nat Ecol Evol 7, 1945–1946 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02233-3

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