Deforestation in Brazil fell by 32.4% in 2024
Five of Brazil’s six biomes saw deforestation shrink in 2024 compared to the previous year, as per data released Wednesday (May. 14) by MapBiomas, a network of NGOs, universities, and technology companies. The exception was the Atlantic forest, which remained virtually stable.
Compared to 2023, deforestation in 2024 was down for the pantanal (58.6%), the pampa (42.1%), the cerrado (41.2%), the Amazon (16.8%), and the caatinga (13.4%)—and up for the Atlantic forest (2%).
Countrywide, the deforested area shrank 32.4 percent, with alerts plunging 26.9 percent. A total of 1,242,079 hectares were deforested in 2024, with 60,983 alerts ed.
In 2024, over 89 percent of the deforested area in the country was in the Amazon or the cerrado. Savannah formations (cerrado) were the most extensively deforested areas and ed for 52.4 percent of all deforestation in Brazil. Forest formations ed for another 43.7 percent.
One of the items monitored is the loss of native vegetation due to extreme climatic events, which is why the Atlantic forest has not kept pace with the other biomes, MapBiomas General Coordinator Tasso Azevedo noted.
“If we hadn’t had the deforestation ed under extreme events, deforestation would have been 20 percent lower,” he pointed out.
Tackling the issue
The results may reflect three changes observed during this period, researchers argued.
“In recent years, plans have been devised to tackle deforestation across all biomes, which was not the case before. Another issue is that the states’ involvement in anti-deforestation efforts has increased, in of both work on embargoes and notices issued by [national environmental authority] Ibama. The third factor is rural credit. There has been an increase in the use of these data for granting rural credit,” Azevedo declared.
Despite the reductions, in 2024, for the second year running, the cerrado was the Brazilian biome with the largest deforested area—over 652 thousand hectares of native vegetation subtracted.
“This change occurred for the first time in 2023. Historically, deforestation has always been concentrated in Amazon regions. This year, a reduction was reported in both biomes, but deforestation still maintained the previous pattern, because it was greater in the cerrado than in the Amazon,” said Marcos Rosa, MapBiomas’ technical coordinator.
Permits
Also surveyed were the permits granted to suppress vegetation.
In 2024, 43 percent of Brazil’s deforested area was under some form of authorization. The cerrado was the biome with the greatest area covered by permits, with 66 percent of native vegetation suppressed with authorization. In the Amazon, this percentage was 14 percent.
In a broader analysis of the survey’s time series, which began in 2019, the specialists found that Brazil has deforested 9,880,551 hectares in these six years, 67 percent of which was native vegetation in the Amazon region.
Deforestation due to pressure from agriculture is said to for more than 97 percent of all the loss of native vegetation in Brazil in the last six years.
