Amazon deforestation nearly doubles, driven by forest fires

The federal government’s daily deforestation warning system found a sharp uptick in forest loss from May 2024 to May 2025. An area nearly the size of the city of Belém, the COP30 host, was cleared, mostly by forest fires.

The government’s Deter system uses photographs taken by satellites to issue real-time deforestation alerts. Images are typically more precise in May, when there is less of the cloud cover found over the Amazon during the rainy months. This was why the extent of the damage caused by last year’s fire season could now be seen more clearly for the first time. Reporting late last year by SUMAÚMA showed that over half of the fires identified up to September began in areas where cattle are farmed. According to the government, the climate crisis, which triggered record flooding last year, has left the forest even more susceptible to fires, causing blazes to spread faster.

Acting environment and climate change minister João Paulo Capobianco led a group of technical staff and public servants who shared their data with the press on Friday, June 6, in Brasília. The indelible marks these fires have left on deforestation figures “are evidence of the warnings already issued by science that the rainforest is suffering rather large impacts from climate change and that its resistance [to fire] has been reduced,” he said.

The numbers shared at the meeting paint a clear picture of how big the problem is. From 2016 to 2022, vegetation lost to fire never exceeded 14% of the deforestation found in May. This situation rapidly shifted in May 2023, when fire ravaged 32% of the 812 square kilometers of rainforest lost. This figure fell in May 2024, with fires gobbling up 21% of the 500 square kilometers deforested.

Yet it was unprecedented to find a scenario where fire was behind most of the loss in forest area, as occurred in May 2025. For the first time, statistics from the consolidated satellite imaging system show that fire destroyed more of the Amazon Rainforest (approximately 490 square kilometers) than cutting down trees did. Illegal and legal mining activities accounted for the rest of the deforestation on record for May 2025, around 1% of a total of 960 square kilometers.

The forest’s destruction by fire is technically referred to as “deforestation with vegetation.” Satellites find areas of forest that have been consumed by flames so many times over that the system equates them to areas without any plant cover. Actually, what is there can still be called a “forest in collapse” – the term used by Capobianco. “They’re areas where the vegetation no longer serves as a forest,” according to Cláudio Almeida, the coordinator of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, which runs the Deter system.

These numbers made May 2025 the second worst May on record since 2016. The all-time high was in May 2021, when 1,391 square kilometers were deforested.

“If we look at the data, it is frightening,” Osvaldo Luiz Leal de Moraes admits. He is an expert on the climate and natural disasters and is currently the director of the Climate and Sustainability Department at the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. “TheAmazon has had five droughts this century. They’re not a natural phenomenon, but the result of anthropic [human] actions. The average precipitation during the last drought [in 2024] was 700 millimeters, in a forest where it usually rains around 2,400 millimeters in a year. The acceleration of this anomaly in precipitation is a red flag. This could be an unsustainable situation for the forest.” Moraes used strong words to explain what he sees: “Perhaps we still have a bit to go before we reach the gates of hell,” he said, but “we’re nearing an awful limit.”

Other numbers found by the Deter are equally alarming. From August 2024 to May 2025, nearly 24% of the fires found in the Amazon happened in old growth forest. This figure was around 10% for this same period in other years. Yet 48% of the area that burned from August 2024 to May 2025 was primary vegetation, while 8% was secondary vegetation. In other words: over half of the forest burned during the drought-ridden fire season in the second half of 2024 was native forest.

This is not an exclusively Brazilian situation, João Paulo Capobianco noted. In 2024, fire accounted for nearly half of global forest losses. Nearly all of Canada’s deforestation was the result of fire. “It’s necessary, at this moment when we’re about to welcome the COP30, to make international responsibility clear about a fact that affects the group of forests on the planet. The deterioration in the climate situation is not the responsibility of one country or another,” he said.

In Brazil, the Environment and Climate Change Ministry is trying to respond to this new scenario with money to equip and prepare the country’s environmental agency, Ibama (R$ 825 million), and state fire departments (R$ 405 million) to fight fires.

There is nevertheless lots of fuel for the fires. Like Bill 2159/21, better known as the Devastation Bill, which passed the Senate in May after the ruralist lobby within the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers’ Party) administration forced it through. Capobianco finds it “worrisome” that the Devastation Bill exempts developments from analyzing the indirect impacts of any projects they intend to carry out. When building or paving a highway, for instance, this means failing to consider “the rise in fires caused by irregular and predatory occupation” along the sides of these roadways. “Fires are one of the most important [indirect impacts] on the Amazon’s reality,” Capobianco said.

Now it is up to the Chamber of Deputies, which should analyze the Devastation Bill in the coming days, to decide the future of the forest and other biomes.