Nearly all deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon in the past year was illegal, a new report finds.
Between August 2023 and July 2024, 91% of forest clearing in the Amazon lacked authorization, according to an analysis by the NGO Center of Life Institute (ICV). In the Cerrado, an expanding agricultural frontier and the world’s most biodiverse tropical savanna that covers a quarter of Brazil, the figure for unauthorized clearing was 51%.
Brazilian law allows some legal deforestation on private land designated for economic use, such as cattle ranching and soy production. In the Amazon Rainforest, landowners can clear up to 20% of their property with a government-issued permit. In the Cerrado, the legal limit is up to 80% of vegetation.
However, ICV researchers found that much of the clearing wasn’t registered in official databases, signaling widespread illegal deforestation.
“These results highlight the scale of the challenge in combating illegal deforestation in Brazil’s largest and most pressured biomes,” Vinicius Salgueiro of ICV’s Territorial Intelligence Unit said in a statement.
While stronger enforcement is crucial, it must be paired with measures that make illegal clearing financially unviable “to end the current logic that seems to prevail, that illegal deforestation pays off,” Salgueiro said.
To arrive at their conclusion, the researchers cross-referenced deforestation alerts from the Brazilian space agency’s satellite monitoring system with both national and state-level databases for deforestation permits.
Any forest clearing detected by satellites but not found in official permit records was classified as illegal.
The findings showed that from August 2023 to July 2024, only 9% of deforestation in the Amazon and 49% in the Cerrado had authorization. Researchers also found that only eight of the 16 states in these biomes fully integrate their permit data with Sinaflor, a federal database, making it harder to track legal deforestation.
“Illegal deforestation thrives in the absence of transparency,” Marcondes Coelho, the coordinator of the transparency and climate justice program at ICV, said in a statement, adding that the fragmented permit system limits oversight and creates opportunities for fraud. “This creates loopholes for irregularities and undermines environmental enforcement.”
The situation in the Amazon biome isn’t new, said Suely Araújo, public policy coordinator at Brazil’s Climate Observatory.
“Deforestation in the Amazon has always been marked by illegality,” Araújo told Mongabay in a written message. “The presence of organized crime has intensified, but the reality of the absence of public authorities at different levels of government is a serious and longstanding problem in the region.”
In the Cerrado savanna, deforestation is concerning even when legal, Araújo said. She called for stricter permits and policies that encourage production in already deforested areas. “Deforestation in the Cerrado is largely authorized in advance by state environmental agencies. That does not mean it is without problems, quite the opposite,” she said. “They approve more than they should.”
Banner image: Illegal deforestation in Pauini, Amazonas state, Brazil. Image courtesy of Brazilian Federal Police.
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