BRASÍLIA — Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell to 4,480 square kilometers in the 12 months through July, the lowest annual figure since satellite monitoring began in 1988, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research announced on Friday, a 22 percent decline from the previous year and a 61 percent drop from the 2022 peak.
The figure, drawn from the institute’s annual PRODES survey, was hailed by the government as proof that enforcement works. Environmental fines rose 73 percent over the period, more than 1,400 pieces of heavy machinery were seized or destroyed on illegal clearings, and a satellite-based alert system now flags clearings within 48 hours. “We said it could be done, and it is being done,” said the environment minister, Clara Benevides Rocha, at a news conference in Brasília.
The announcement comes less than a year after Brazil hosted the United Nations climate conference in Belém and pledged to end illegal deforestation by 2030. The Amazon stores roughly 120 billion metric tons of carbon, and scientists have warned that continued clearing could push large parts of the forest past a tipping point into savanna.
But researchers cautioned that the headline figure tells only part of the story. Forest degradation, in which trees are thinned by logging or fire without the land being fully cleared, rose by 31 percent over the same period, according to a separate analysis by the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, a nonprofit. The institute counted more than 86,000 fire detections across the biome in the year, the third-highest total in a decade, driven by a drought that has gripped the southern Amazon since 2023.
“Clearing is going down because enforcement is up, and that is genuinely good news,” said Dr. Marcelo Teixeira Lima, a senior scientist at the institute. “But a forest that is standing and burning from the inside is not a healthy forest. Degradation now releases more carbon than deforestation does.”
The decline has also been uneven. The state of Pará, which contains the agricultural frontier along the BR-163 highway, accounted for 41 percent of all clearing, and deforestation actually rose by 8 percent in parts of the neighboring state of Mato Grosso, where soy prices have encouraged expansion onto pasture. Cattle ranching remains the proximate cause of about 80 percent of Amazon clearing.
In the town of Novo Progresso, Pará, a ranching hub long associated with illegal clearing, the mood was sour. “They fly over, they fine, they take the tractor,” said Edivaldo Souza Pereira, 49, who runs a 600-head cattle operation. “Nobody comes to ask how we are supposed to live.” Government officials said that a program paying landowners to keep forest standing would expand to 3,000 properties next year.
The institute will publish its next preliminary figures in November.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 11, 2026, Section A, Page 15 of the European edition with the headline: Amazon Deforestation Falls to Lowest Level Since Satellite Records Began, Brazil Says.
