O Brasil sabe como reduzir o desmatamento

Brazil has already shown that it is capable of rapidly reducing deforestation in the Amazon. What it has not yet shown is that it knows how to turn that reduction into a lasting achievement. The experience of the past two decades reveals that monitoring, oversight, and law enforcement are indispensable but insufficient when they are not accompanied by an economic transformation of the territory they occupy. The challenge, therefore, is no longer simply to prevent the forest from being cut down. It is to make conserving, restoring, and producing a better, more economically advantageous alternative to degradation.

Brazilian experience also teaches another lesson, less celebrated and far more important: reducing deforestation is an extraordinary achievement, without a doubt. However, keeping it low for decades is a completely different challenge. Confusing these two stages was one of the greatest shortcomings of Brazilian environmental policy since the early 2000s.

It is useful to imagine two distinct toolboxes. The first primarily belongs to the State and helps reduce deforestation. It contains command-and-control instruments: satellite monitoring, oversight, fines, embargoes, police operations, criminal accountability, and the enforcement of environmental legislation. This toolbox works and remains essential. Without it, deforestation grows rapidly.

The second toolbox brings together economic instruments: credit, tax incentives, innovation, infrastructure, private investment, markets, and policies capable of making the standing forest a competitive economic asset. This toolbox for valuing the forest and those who depend on it, however, remains incomplete.

Building a new outlook for the Amazon is imperative, within a broader agenda of transitions. Regenerative agriculture, the recovery of degraded areas, the bioeconomy, higher-productivity livestock farming, and the valuation of environmental services can connect forest conservation to the climate, food, and water transitions that Brazil and the world need.

It is precisely this difference that explains why Brazil managed to reduce deforestation drastically but was unable to consolidate that victory. Between 2004 and 2012, the country achieved one of the largest reductions in tropical deforestation in history. In less than a decade, devastation fell by around 80%. The Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon (PPCDAm) became an international reference by combining enforcement, intelligence, satellite monitoring, and land-use planning.

But few remember that the original plan had four pillars. In addition to strengthening enforcement, land tenure regularization, and land-use planning, there was a fourth component: promoting sustainable productive activities. It was precisely this pillar that never gained the same political priority or the necessary investment. In practice, we fought deforestation without building an economy capable of replacing it.

While enforcement reduced illegality, sufficiently robust economic alternatives did not emerge to occupy that space. The result appeared a few years later. From 2012 onward, the rates slowly began to rise—first to five thousand square kilometers a year, then to six thousand, then seven thousand, until once again surpassing the mark of ten thousand square kilometers during the Jair Bolsonaro administration.

It would be convenient to attribute this entire trajectory solely to the institutional dismantling that occurred between 2019 and 2022. This certainly worsened the problem, but the growth curve began earlier. The truth is more uncomfortable. The country won the enforcement battle but missed the opportunity to transform the Amazon economy—and economic vacuums do not remain empty.

In the absence of sustainable economic alternatives that are more in harmony with the standing forest, an environment is created in which illegal activities become a source of local jobs and income. This is exactly what happened in various regions of the Amazon. The absence of consistent investment in sustainable production chains opened space for the strengthening of the illegal seizure of public land (grilagem), illegal mining, clandestine logging, and criminal networks that today operate with financial and logistical capacity far greater than that which existed twenty years ago. This makes the current challenge even greater.

In the 2000s, the problem was containing an expanding agricultural frontier. Today, it is a matter of confronting criminal organizations deeply rooted in the regional economy. A recent study by the Brazilian Public Security Forum found that, in the Amazon, organized crime has been appropriating natural resources. Gold is no longer the only asset and now shares space with illegal logging, land grabbing, and even wildlife trafficking. The forest has become a lucrative business, causing losses for society as a whole and, in particular, for nature.

For this reason, we need to go beyond command-and-control actions. They will remain indispensable. But they are no longer enough. If we want to keep deforestation at low levels over the coming decades, it will be necessary to build a genuine economic policy for the Amazon. This means abandoning the idea that protecting the forest is merely an environmental agenda. Conservation is also industrial policy. It is also agricultural policy. It is also infrastructure policy.

The forest regulates the water cycle through evapotranspiration, contributing to the formation of the rains that irrigate Brazil's main food-producing regions and guaranteeing most of the country's hydroelectric power generation. It is water that sustains fishing communities and enables the river transport that connects thousands of riverine communities. This entire essential service provided by nature is being threatened by deforestation.

Given the advance of deforestation, the priority must be to conserve the forests that still fully perform these essential services. In addition, the restoration of degraded areas is indispensable for recovering landscapes, increasing territorial resilience, and maintaining forest integrity. Recent studies by the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) show that restored forests are still unable to fully re-establish fundamental functions, such as evapotranspiration and temperature regulation, reinforcing that the loss of a forest represents an immediate interruption of ecosystem services that can take decades to recover, even partially.

Forest restoration, however, needs to be seen as more than merely an environmental obligation. If well planned and strategically positioned, it can become an important economic infrastructure, stimulating investment in nurseries, seed production, technical assistance, research, jobs, and environmental services over decades. In addition, intact forest blocks near cropland increase the resilience of agricultural production to climate change, reducing risk for businesses.

Another important natural asset, biodiversity, also needs to be incorporated into production chains in a much more sophisticated way and on a larger scale. It is not enough to trade raw materials. Economic value lies in innovation, industrial processing, science, and the ability to transform biodiversity assets into high-value-added products.

This is where bioindustrialization comes in. For years, the bioeconomy has been a recurring concept in Amazon discourse. But discourse does not create markets. It will be necessary to expand investment in research, infrastructure, technology, logistics, credit, and innovation so that the bioeconomy moves from a set of promising experiments to a genuine engine of regional development.

At the same time, it will be necessary to confront a topic often treated with discomfort: cattle ranching. There is no plausible scenario for the future of the Amazon that ignores its economic importance. Seven out of every ten smallholdings have at least one head of cattle. Cattle ranching occupies 75 million hectares in the region. There is, however, a low density: 0.73 animals per hectare. Raising cattle in the Legal Amazon remains a source of livelihood for small producers, who use the meat and milk and also treat cattle as an asset to sell when necessary.

The issue, therefore, is not to eliminate cattle ranching but to transform it. Currently, a large share of Amazonian cattle ranching has extremely low productivity. This means there is enormous room to produce much more on areas already cleared, drastically reducing the pressure to open new areas. Recovering degraded pastures, technical assistance, proper management, and sustainable intensification technologies can significantly increase production without the need to fell a single tree.

In summary, the future of the Amazon will require combining different economic models. The sociobioeconomy will continue to be fundamental for strengthening traditional communities and Indigenous Peoples. A science-based bioeconomy can open new markets. Bioindustrialization will add value to forest products, and conventional activities, such as agriculture and livestock farming, modernized and made more efficient, have the potential to generate more income with less pressure on the forest.

This transformation needs to be understood within a broader agenda: that of regenerative agriculture, which will represent a change in logic for the sector. The objective is no longer simply to produce more from more inputs and more land, but to produce more and better by using the territory efficiently, restoring soils, conserving water, expanding biodiversity, and increasing the capacity of farms to withstand droughts, heat waves, and extreme weather events. In the Amazon, this means, above all, producing on areas that are already cleared and degraded, reducing the need to convert new areas.

Regenerative agriculture also helps connect agendas that were long treated separately. The climate transition depends on reducing emissions and increasing the capacity of soils and vegetation to store carbon. The food transition depends on producing enough nutritious food without destroying the ecological base that sustains production. And the water transition depends on preserving the natural systems that regulate water availability and quality. In the Amazon, these three agendas are deeply connected. The forest influences rainfall, water sustains agricultural production, and production, in turn, can help conserve or degrade the natural systems on which it depends.

This is the point at which the recovery of degraded pastures, agroforestry systems, the integration of crops, livestock, and forest, proper soil management, bioinputs, and technical assistance cease to be merely instruments of agricultural policy. They become components of a climate, food, and water security strategy. Brazil's great opportunity lies precisely in making this transition without expanding the agricultural frontier: producing more where deforestation has already occurred while keeping intact the ecosystems that still fully perform their functions.

This vision also changes the way restoration is understood. Restoring is not merely replanting trees, but rebuilding the productive and ecological capacity of a landscape. It can mean recovering springs, improving soils, reconnecting fragments of vegetation, diversifying production, and creating new sources of income. At the same time, restoration cannot be used to justify the replacement of mature forests. As the central argument of this article itself demonstrates, protecting ecosystems that still function fully is a priority; restoration complements this strategy and increases the resilience of territories.

Finally, there are various strategies for remunerating the standing forest, such as carbon markets, payment for environmental services, environmental offsets, and even the Brazilian proposal to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF), among others. Such mechanisms serve both as incentives for conservation and as a strategy for maintaining the integrity of the forest, combining different conservation profiles on private and public lands.

This transformation also opens a new frontier for the relationship between Brazil and China, its main trading partner. For decades, the agricultural relationship between the two countries was structured mainly around the trade of large volumes of commodities. But more recent exchanges indicate that there is room for a much more diversified agenda, involving science, technology, traceability, the recovery of degraded areas, low-carbon agriculture and livestock farming, bioinputs, and food systems. The Brazilian government itself identifies the recovery of degraded pastures and low-carbon technologies as areas with potential to expand bilateral cooperation.

Recent exchanges between Brazilian and Chinese institutions reinforce this possibility. In initiatives promoted by IPAM and partner organizations, researchers and organizations from both countries have been discussing agriculture, food systems, deforestation, restoration, and production chains. In 2025, IPAM and the South-North Institute of Sustainable Development, based in Beijing, signed a partnership to study the impacts of climate change on agricultural production and trade between the two countries. In 2026, the bilateral dialogue also advanced toward integrating forests, food security, sustainable agriculture, biodiversity, and finance.

China, therefore, can be seen not only as a market for Brazilian products, but as part of the transition equation. The challenge is to transform the scale of this trade relationship into a platform for innovation and sustainable development. If Brazil has accumulated knowledge on tropical agriculture, agroforestry systems, forest restoration, and conservation, China has relevant experience in technology, infrastructure, innovation, and large-scale restoration policies. Combining this knowledge can help build production chains capable of simultaneously responding to the demand for food, the need to reduce emissions, and the urgency of protecting natural resources.

None of these strategies is sufficient on its own. Together, however, they can create something that has never fully existed in the Amazon: an economy capable of competing with illegality. This will require profound changes in the country's investment priorities. It will be necessary to redirect part of rural credit resources toward the recovery of degraded areas and sustainable production systems; to create tax incentives for new industries linked to biodiversity; and to expand infrastructure compatible with the forest economy, including digital connectivity, clean energy, storage, technical assistance, and logistics adapted to Amazonian production chains.

Above all, it will be necessary to understand that the fight against deforestation does not end when the chainsaws fall silent. It ends when cutting down the forest no longer makes economic sense. This is perhaps the main lesson of recent history. Brazil has already shown twice that it knows how to reduce deforestation. Now it will have the opportunity to show that it also knows how to prevent its return.

Brazil already knows the first half of this story. It knows how to monitor the forest, identify deforestation, enforce the law, impose embargoes, and hold violators accountable. The second half is more complex: building an economy in which prosperity depends less on the conversion of new territories and more on the capacity to produce, regenerate, and add value to what already exists.

This strategy matters to Brazil not only to protect the Amazon, but to guarantee food, water, and climate security in a changing world. And it can gain scale through new forms of international cooperation, including with China, connecting science, technology, markets, and investment. Brazil's true environmental policy success, therefore, will not be simply to bring the deforestation curve down again. It will be necessary to build the conditions so that it does not rise again. The ultimate goal is not simply to prevent forest clearing, but to make conservation, regeneration, and sustainable production the foundations of a new Amazonian economy. 

Translated by Victoria Corrêa do Lago with the support of digital machine translation tools: Claude (initial draft), Grammarly (grammatical and syntactic revision), and ChatGPT (selective phrasing refinements). Reviewed by the author.

Submitted: August 3, 2026

Accepted for publication: September 2, 2026

Copyright © 2026 CEBRI-Journal. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original article is properly cited.