Satellites recorded 3,335 sq km of Amazon forest cleared in the year to July 2026, down 42% in a year. The figures landed nine days before Brazil chooses between Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro.
Brazil’s PRODES satellite monitoring measured 3,335 sq km of deforestation in the Amazon between August 2025 and July 2026. That’s 41.8% below the previous year’s 5,731 sq km and the lowest annual figure since the series began in 1988. The environment ministry released the data, produced by the space research agency INPE, on 16 October.
The previous low, 4,571 sq km in the year to July 2012, had stood for 14 years. Clearing reached nearly 30,000 sq km a year in the mid-1990s. In the year to July 2022, the last full PRODES year under Jair Bolsonaro, it stood at 11,594 sq km. It has fallen in each of the four years since, by 71% in all.
Brazil’s central savanna, the Cerrado, also hit a record low. Clearing there fell 23.8% to 5,517 sq km, the smallest figure in a series that began in 2001. Even so, the Cerrado lost about 65% more land than the Amazon. Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia, the farming frontier known as MATOPIBA, accounted for 74.3% of it.
What changed on the ground
Between 2023 and 2026, IBAMA, the federal environment agency, carried out 76,095 enforcement actions and issued R$11.8bn in fines. It also placed embargoes on 18,630 sq km of land, ministry data shows. In 2023, the government restarted a cross-ministry plan against Amazon deforestation that had been halted in 2019. Its goal is to end illegal deforestation by 2030.
“It’s an absolutely stratospheric drop… it’s like a dream,” João Paulo Capobianco, Brazil’s environment minister, told reporters in Brasília.
In Pará, clearing dropped 45.3% to 1,130 sq km, and in Mato Grosso 46.7% to 849 sq km. Roraima was the one major state where it rose, from 285 to 286 sq km.
What the numbers leave out
The 3,335 sq km figure is preliminary and based on priority satellite images. INPE publishes a consolidated rate in the first half of 2027. Fires in the southern Amazon typically rise in the year after a strong El Niño, and one is now developing in the Pacific.
WWF’s Living Planet Report 2026 put the average fall in monitored wildlife populations across Latin America and the Caribbean at 95% since 1970.
A vote on the enforcement model
On 25 October, Brazilians choose between President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro in a presidential runoff. Polls show the race neck and neck. Flávio Bolsonaro’s manifesto pledges to end illegal deforestation by 2029. It also promises stronger oversight aimed at organised crime rather than extractive workers and small farmers.
From 30 December 2026, large companies selling cattle, soy, coffee, cocoa, palm oil, rubber or wood in the EU must comply with its deforestation regulation. That includes beef, soy and coffee shipped from Brazil.
INPE’s consolidated figure in 2027 will show whether the 3,335 sq km holds. Its next annual count, to July 2027, will also cover the first months of whichever government takes office in the new year.
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