Area Burned in Brazil Amazon Falls to Lowest Level Since Records Began

The area burned in Brazil's Amazon in 2025 was dramatically smaller than the year before, according to the deforestation monitoring group MapBiomas, marking the lowest figure since records began four decades ago.

A MapBiomas report states that 3.1 million hectares of Brazil's Amazon burned last year, compared with a record-breaking 15.8 million hectares in 2024. The area affected in the world's largest rainforest was the smallest since the group's records began in 1985.

Protecting the Amazon was among the central pledges President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made when running for office four years ago, and the figures will be treated as a boost to his campaign for re-election in October.

The comparison year was an extreme one. In 2024 the Amazon experienced its worst forest fires in over two decades, which the Copernicus Climate Change Service attributed to "climate extremes and human activity".

Researchers were careful not to overclaim. "The 2025 figures are significant and show that it is possible to reduce the burned area in the country," said Vera Arruda, a researcher at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute and a MapBiomas coordinator. "The 31% drop compared to the historical average — driven primarily by the lowest number of fires recorded in the Amazon in 41 years — is positive news, but it does not yet allow us to conclude that this is an established trend or to scale back prevention efforts."

The decline extends beyond the rainforest. Around 12.7 million hectares burned across Brazil in 2025, against 30 million hectares in 2024. The national record remains 2007, when 30.7 million hectares burned.

Part of the improvement is meteorological rather than political. The fall partly reflects an easing of the unprecedented 2024 fires, helped by cooler La Niña conditions replacing the warmer El Niño that preceded them. MapBiomas warned that the return of El Niño, which pushes up global temperatures, could extend this year's dry season and raise the risk of fires again — meaning the 2026 figures will be a better test of whether policy or weather is doing the work.

The stakes are not confined to Brazil. Tropical rainforests like the Amazon are home to millions of species and, in a healthy state, absorb vast quantities of planet-warming carbon dioxide. They have come under increasing pressure from decades of deliberate land clearance for agriculture and logging, and from climate change, which scientists warn creates the conditions for larger fires to spread.

Lula took office promising to reverse the deforestation that occurred under his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, who argued that more farming and mining in the Amazon would reduce regional poverty and whom environmentalists accused of allowing deforestation to accelerate.

Reported from the BBC.