Brazil could reach all-time lowest deforestation rates within two years

Deforestation in Brazil — which threatens the Amazon Rainforest, pictured above, — could hit an all-time low in the next 1-2 years, one government official said this week. (Reuters/Ueslei Marcelino)

Deforestation in Brazil is projected to hit a historic low by 2025, a government official told reporters this week.

The president of Ibama — Brazil’s environmental enforcement agency — told several outlets that the country expects deforestation to reach the same rates recorded in 2012, when the country was at its lowest rate of deforestation yet, Reuters reported.

“Who knows, in one or two years we could hit the numbers from 2012 and we will work in the direction of zero deforestation,” Rodrigo Agostinho told reporters, per Reuters.

Ibama did not immediately respond to The Independent’s request for comment.

Mr Agostinho’s announcement comes after Brazil hit a fifteen-year deforestation high in 2021 under former president Jair Bolsonaro, the Associated Press reported. In the four years Mr Bolsonaro was in power, deforestation rose 60 per cent.

When Brazil’s current president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, took office on 1 January, deforestation rates began dropping almost immediately. Within the first six months of 2023, Amazon deforestation in Brazil dropped by 33.6 per cent.

João Paulo Capobianco, executive secretary for Ibama, said in July the deforestation growth curve had been reversed, The Independent previously reported.

“That is a fact: we reversed the curve; deforestation isn’t increasing,” Mr Capobianco said.

This projection comes on the heels of a major heatwave and series of disastrous floods and wildfires in Brazil.

Last week, a 23-year-old woman died after waiting for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour concert in Rio de Janeiro in a heat index that peaked at 58.8C (138F) degrees. Meanwhile, the high heat has spurred wildfires, caused widespread power outages in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and contributed to the Rio Grande flooding.

Brazil’s population and environment — particularly in the regions containing parts of the Amazon Rainforest — are under severe threats from the human-driven climate crisis, per the United Nations Development Programme.