Over the past ten months, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has accelerated – Liberation
Deforestation of The Brazilian Amazon Accelerated in the past ten months, according to official data published on Friday, especially due to the resurgence of fires. The destruction of forest coverage increased by 9.1% between August 2024 and May 2025 compared to the same period the previous year.
According to data from the National Institute for Spatial Research (INPE), deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon even increased by 92% in May compared to the same month in the previous year. With 960 square kilometers of lost forest, this is the second worst result for a month of May.
If this trend is maintained until the end of the year, it will contradict Good results recorded in 2024 In all Macroecosystems (Biomes) in Brazil for the first time in six years.
The situation is however more encouraging in the Pantanal (vast wetland in the south of the Amazon) and Cerrado (the Brazilian savannah), where the pace of deforestation slowed 77% and 22% between August 2024 and May 2025 compared to the same previous period respectively.
But the climate observatory network warned that « Without a trend reversal in June and July, Brazil could arrive at COP30 (which he organizes in November in the Amazonian city of Belèm, editor’s note) with an increase in destruction ” forest cover.
The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silvawho is committed to eradicating illegal deforestation by 2030, hopes that COP30 gives a significant boost to the commitment of countries in the fight against climate change. The vegetable cover is essential to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and its destruction aggravates global warming.
Globally, the destruction of tropical virgin forests has reached last year a record level for at least twenty years, due to the fires themselves favored by climate change.
The tropical regions lost a total of 6.7 million hectares of primary forest last year, at the highest since the start of data collection in 2002 by the Global Forest Watch reference observatory, developed by the American reflection group World Resources Institute (WRI) with the University of Maryland. This figure, up 80% compared to 2023, is equivalent to the loss of 18 football fields per minute, according to the observatory.
