The implications extend far beyond Brazil. The Amazon and Cerrado play vital roles in controlling rainfall across South America and stabilizing the global climate by storing vast amounts of carbon. The Amazon alone harbors over half of the planet’s remaining tropical forests and a significant portion of its wildlife. Should it become irretrievably damaged, the repercussions will be felt in agriculture, water supplies, public health, and economies worldwide. What is occurring is not a singular crisis but a complex web of political, economic, and ecological challenges. The decisions made today will shape these environments and the lives connected to them for generations.
Beef and Soya
Brazil leads the world in beef production and export, serving markets in China, Europe, the Middle East, the UK, and beyond. However, cattle ranching is the most significant cause of deforestation and degradation in the Amazon. Large areas of forest, often cleared illegally, are transformed into pasture, a process that may take weeks but has effects lasting generations. Researchers estimate that approximately 80% of deforested land in the Amazon is eventually used as cattle pasture. The greenhouse gas consequences are severe: emissions from deforestation, fires, methane, and soil degradation make livestock one of Brazil’s largest climate burdens.
Indigenous lands are increasingly encircled by pastures. Fires set to clear land often escape into forest edges, harming ecosystems that did not evolve with regular burning. During droughts, these fires can become uncontrollable. Smoke knows no borders, and for forest-dwelling communities, the impacts are immediate. Rivers get silted, fish stocks dwindle, and respiratory illnesses increase among children and the elderly.
Luciana Gatti, a senior researcher at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE), commented: “There’s been a significant rise in exports of wood, beef, soy, corn, and minerals. This is an initiative focused on destroying nature to sell primary commodities. Water systems are damaged by these development models, with severe consequences for ecosystems and the Brazilian population, while consolidating wealth and power among large landowners.”
While cattle ranching is the main cause of deforestation in the Amazon, soya cultivation has transformed the Cerrado, a blend of grasslands, forests, and savannas spanning over 2 million square kilometers and feeding the headwaters of eight of Brazil’s twelve major river basins. In the past five decades, half of the Cerrado has been destroyed. Industrial soya, largely destined for animal feed in China, Europe, the UK, and beyond, continues to expand, threatening the remaining areas. Unlike the Amazon, the Cerrado has fewer legal protections and less international scrutiny. As enforcement tightened in parts of the Amazon, agribusiness shifted to the weaker-governed Cerrado. Cássio Cardoso Pereira, a researcher at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), noted:
“Unlike the Amazon, most deforestation in the Cerrado is still legally allowed, protecting corporations and supply chains from oversight. International accountability has failed because global climate and biodiversity frameworks largely ignore grasslands and savannas, treating them as disposable landscapes rather than essential ecosystems.”
Brazil’s water system relies on a delicate balance between the Amazon rainforest and the Cerrado. Together, they form a vast hydrological system that transports moisture through the atmosphere, stores groundwater, and stabilizes river basins across much of South America. The Amazon basin is the largest freshwater system on Earth, and the Cerrado contains about 80% of Brazil’s water basins. Despite this abundance, Brazil is facing a water crisis. As native vegetation disappears, aquifers recharge more slowly, and rivers feeding the continent’s major hydrographic basins thin. Rainfall patterns weaken, droughts extend, and heatwaves intensify. What begins as land clearance becomes a larger destabilization of the water cycle. According to Gatti, 2024 witnessed the Amazon’s highest carbon emissions on record, mainly due to fires. Yet, Brazil’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI) classifies emissions from Amazon fires as net zero under its official accounting methodology, despite fires now being the region’s largest carbon emissions source.
Augusto Getirana, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, noted: “A water crisis in Brazil disrupting domestic food production quickly becomes a global crisis. We saw that in 2021 when commodity prices increased substantially worldwide.”
Communities report reduced water availability and contamination from agrochemicals.
Traditional geraizeiro (communities of the Cerrado region) and quilombola (communities formed by Afro-Brazilian fugitive or freed enslaved people), many without official land titles, find themselves surrounded by monocultures. The transformation is not just physical but cultural. This is not just about beef or soya, but about a growth model that clears land faster than it can recover. Profits move abroad, but the damage stays, seen in depleted rivers, degraded soil, and communities pushed to the margins. If this continues, Brazil risks weakening the very systems sustaining its people and economy.
The BR-319 highway
The BR-319 highway starkly symbolizes the Amazon’s crossroads. The 885-kilometer federal highway runs from Manaus, the capital of Amazonas, to Porto Velho on the forest’s southern edge. Built in the 1970s under Brazil’s military dictatorship and abandoned in the late 1980s due to maintenance difficulties, the highway is now at the heart of a high-stakes debate about the Amazon’s future. It cuts through one of the most pristine areas of the Amazon. Current government plans to reconstruct and pave it are presented as boosting regional development and connectivity, but critics warn that BR-319 could bring widespread environmental, social, and health consequences. Philip Fearnside, a research professor at the National Institute for Research in Amazonia (INPA), explained: “Repaving the BR-319 highway would connect the undisturbed central Amazon to the AMACRO region – a deforestation hotspot named after the states of Amazonas, Acre, and Rondônia. Although AMACRO is promoted as a sustainable development zone, it has become a major driver of Amazon rainforest deforestation.”
An Indigenous leader from the Mura people at Lake Capanã Grande expressed concerns about the highway’s impact on his village. (His name is withheld for safety.) He said: “I would like to express my indignation regarding the BR-319 highway’s impact on the Indigenous lands of Lake Capanã. This brings us problems, manipulation of rights, violation of our traditional areas, occupation by land grabbers, pollution of our river, destruction of our nature. This causes major problems in our rivers’ flow. Streams are being buried. Here we use the river water. The road will become an open door for criminals, drug dealers, all types of drugs, as already exists. The Indigenous population lives off nature; not livestock. They live off traditional objects. They live off nature for their survival and protect their own nature. I am against this paving.”
Reconstructing the BR-319 highway is particularly risky as it encourages expansion beyond the main road. A network of unauthorized side roads already branches off the corridor, created by loggers, miners, and land grabbers. Once the main highway is fully passable year-round, these side roads are expected to grow rapidly in a ‘fishbone’ pattern, penetrating deeper into largely undisturbed forests. Official plans also include state highways like AM-366, AM-360, AM-343, and AM-356, designed to connect BR-319 to remote forest areas like the Trans-Purus region, further opening areas largely protected from large-scale human activity. Indigenous and traditional communities are on the front lines of these threats. There are 69 Indigenous territories and eighteen thousand Indigenous people along the highway’s path. These communities have not been properly consulted, violating ILO Convention 169, which requires free, prior, and informed consent before projects affecting Indigenous lands proceed. For these communities, the highway isn’t just a development project; it threatens their livelihoods, rivers, forests, and cultural survival.
The environmental consequences would be substantial. The Amazon stores vast amounts of carbon and generates moisture flows known as ‘flying rivers’, sustaining rainfall across Brazil and beyond. Building a paved highway and opening side roads would accelerate deforestation, fragment habitats, and release large amounts of carbon, undermining the forest’s ability to function as a stable ecosystem. Scientists warn that the combined infrastructure could push the Amazon to an irreversible climate tipping point. Health risks are already evident and likely to increase. Forest fragmentation and increased human activity along BR-319 have been linked to rising malaria cases, while diseases such as Oropouche fever have surged in the region. Expanding into previously untouched natural habitats brings humans and animals into closer contact, raising the risk of zoonotic spillovers, where pathogens jump from animals to humans, creating conditions for potential new pandemics. “Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest and other tropical regions increases the risk of emerging new human diseases by increasing contact between rainforest wildlife and the human population and its domestic animals. It also contributes to climate change, which can create conditions favoring the emergence of parasitic, fungal, viral, and bacterial infections,” explained Fearnside.
BR-319 also attracts organized crime, already growing in the region. Land grabbing, illegal logging, and mining flourish where enforcement is weak, and a paved highway with multiple branch roads would make these activities easier and more profitable. Instead of spreading benefits to local communities, the highway risks spreading displacement, violence, and environmental destruction. The choices made about BR-319 and its network of side roads will shape not only the Amazon’s future but also climate stability, biodiversity, and human health across Brazil, South America, and the rest of the planet for decades.
Biofuels
Brazil has long positioned itself as a pioneer in biofuels. Ethanol from sugar cane and biodiesel from soya are promoted as lower-carbon alternatives to fossil fuels. Recent policy shifts have accelerated blending mandates and incentivized production, but the reality is complex. Large-scale cultivation of sugar cane, oil palm, soya, and corn, crops central to biofuels, continues to expand into ecologically sensitive areas. Projects labeled ‘green’ or ‘clean’ often replicate the same extractive logic that defined previous agricultural growth waves.
Jorge Ernesto Rodrigue Morales, a lecturer and researcher at Stockholm University’s Department of Economic History and International Relations, cautioned: “Despite its success, the biofuels industry in Brazil developed within broader developmental and territorial security goals, often placing significant pressure on ecosystems and communities in an institutional environment that generally overlooked socio-environmental concerns.” He added: “This unsustainable co-evolution of development pathways and bioenergy – marked by deforestation, land colonization, and agricultural expansion – has limited the adaptation space in agriculture.”
Morales explained that like food production, ethanol requires land, water, and nutrients, meaning large-scale expansion could intensify the negative side-effects of agricultural growth. These include significant socio-environmental challenges related to sustainable development goals, such as deforestation (SDG 15), CO2 emissions from land-use change (SDG 13), nitrogen losses (SDGs 13, 14, 15), unsustainable water withdrawals (SDG 14), and food security risks (SDG 2), among others. In this context, the biofuels boom resembles less a climate solution and more an intensification of longstanding land conflicts and ecological strain. While Brazil produces billions of liters of ethanol and biodiesel annually, full accounting of climate impacts, including emissions from land-use change and the energy intensity of cultivation, undermines the claim that biofuels are inherently ‘green’.
Carbon credits
Forest-based carbon credits are promoted to finance conservation while allowing companies to offset residual emissions. Forest carbon projects, including REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) schemes, have multiplied across the Amazon. In theory, carbon credits could channel resources into protecting forests, creating economic incentives to maintain ecological integrity. In practice, the reality often falls short. Critics argue that the current system gives polluters what amounts to a free pass to continue emitting, while land rights, governance, and enforcement are glossed over.
The notion that buying carbon credits lets a company offset its pollution while global forests stay standing sounds tidy but is challenged by academics, revealing a far messier reality. Projects that once gained international recognition, such as the Suruí Indigenous-led conservation initiative, have collapsed under the pressure of illegal mining and cattle expansion, showing that even well-designed offsets are vulnerable in weak legal and enforcement environments. Additionally, the permanence of forest carbon is increasingly uncertain in a warming world. Drought, fire, and illegal logging threaten the integrity of carbon stocks that underpin offset schemes. Thales A.P. West, a tenured assistant professor at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, warned that unless systemic reform occurs, carbon trading will continue prioritizing convenience over climate integrity. He said: “Unless there is a change in attitude among companies, governments, and organizations such as the UN, the market is likely to continue prioritizing convenience over integrity.”
For Indigenous communities, carbon markets can also commodify territories long governed by cultural and spiritual relationships. Forests become units of measurements and trade, while questions of land rights and power remain unresolved.
Bioeconomy
Brazil promotes a bioeconomy as a pathway to growth without deforestation. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has described a future where the Amazon becomes a hub for sustainable business, using renewable resources instead of clearing forests. This idea has become a key part of the government’s climate pitch, attracting significant investment pledges and international attention. But there is a growing gap between hopeful language and reality. The term ‘bioeconomy’ has been used to describe everything from biotech research and carbon markets to large biofuel crops and mining, without clear rules on environmental protection or community rights. While organizations like Eco Invest Brasil are raising billions for ‘green’ projects, critics worry that weak safeguards could allow large companies to proceed without proper local involvement or oversight.
Ossi Ollinaho, a lecturer at the University of Helsinki, cautioned that the promise of green products can easily be subverted when economic incentives still favor large monocultures at biodiversity’s expense. He warned: “The extension of this concept [of bioeconomy] to the Amazon and similar high sociobiodiversity contexts carries the inherent risk of it being pulped and sold for profit.” Without careful planning, the bioeconomy could harm the very forests and communities it claims to protect.
One of the issues is that the word ‘bioeconomy’ is being stretched to cover very different things. Putting industrial crop plantations and small-scale forest products in the same category hides that they have very different impacts. Crops like soya, palm oil, corn, and sugar cane, even when called ‘bioeconomic’, can still drive land-use change, displace small growers, and harm biodiversity. Açaí is the best-known example. Once a local food staple, it’s now a global product worth over US$1 billion. It’s often held up as proof that the bioeconomy can work, but rising demand has changed how it’s grown and harvested, reshaping parts of the forest and creating new pressures on the people who have lived there for generations. What was once seen as sustainable, community-based work is now part of a larger commercial system that doesn’t always benefit those who depend on the forest.
Indigenous leaders and local communities point out that they’ve long lived with and depended on forest resources. Brazil nuts, açaí, and other products have been part of their economies for centuries. What has changed is the scale and type of outside money arriving. Big initiatives like Amazônia 4.0, promoted as high-tech paths to a modern bioeconomy, risk repeating the same patterns of extraction and inequality that have long marked the region.
Without secure land rights and decision-making power for local people, there’s a real fear of biopiracy: companies using traditional knowledge and genetic resources without fair compensation. Brazil has an opportunity to model a type of economic growth that truly supports both people and nature. But if policies remain vague and safeguards are weak, the bioeconomy could end up being little more than a new label for familiar patterns of extraction.
Oil and Gas
While Brazil positions itself as a climate leader on the global stage, the country continues to expand oil and gas exploration at an alarming rate. In June 2025, just ahead of hosting COP30, Brazil’s oil sector regulator, ANP, announced an auction for exploration rights to 172 oil and gas blocks, most offshore, including 47 blocks in the Amazon basin. This move underscores growing tension between climate commitments and ongoing fossil fuel development. The state oil company, Petrobras, is already drilling in the Amazon’s equatorial margin, just 500km from the Amazon River. This is a highly sensitive ecosystem, home to coral reefs and mangroves. Oil spills have already been reported in the area.
According to Amazônia Real, planned exploration at the river’s mouth threatens to directly affect several Indigenous communities in the state of Amapá. Among those most at risk are the Karipuna, Palikur-Arukwayene, Galibi Marworno, and Galibi Kali’na peoples, who live across three officially recognized Indigenous territories: Uaçá, Juminã, and Galibi. Together, these territories cover roughly 518,454 hectares and are home to around 13,000 people living in 56 villages, an area relying intimately on the forest and waterways for survival.
Further west in the Amazon, Rosneft, the Russian state-owned oil and gas company, holds drilling rights to several blocks in the Solimões sedimentary basin near the Purus River, the route of the proposed BR-319 highway. This remote, largely intact part of the rainforest remains remarkably undisturbed, with ecosystems and local communities highly dependent on the surrounding land and rivers. Environmental concerns are pressing, as new roads and infrastructure could open these isolated areas to industrial activity, putting the forest under pressure from deforestation, habitat fragmentation, and fossil fuel extraction in one of the most ecologically sensitive regions of the Amazon.
In 2025, Brazil moved further towards expanding fossil fuel production, with daily oil and gas output averaging just under 4.9 million barrels of oil equivalent, representing a 13.3% increase from the previous year. Oil production alone accounts for about 3.7 million barrels per day, more than half exported, linking Brazil’s expansion directly to global energy demand. The consequences are clear and urgent. Rising fossil fuel production drives emissions higher, intensifying climate impacts already visible through stronger storms, heatwaves, flooding, and ecosystem loss. Every delay in reducing fossil fuel reliance deepens future risks, and the window to prevent the most catastrophic outcomes is rapidly closing.
Hydropower
Hydropower provides over 50% of Brazil’s electricity and is often celebrated as a national achievement. Large dams are promoted as a source of clean energy, but the social and ecological costs tell a much harsher story. Across the Amazon basin, dams have flooded vast areas of forest, displaced thousands of Indigenous and riverside communities, and disrupted river flows these communities rely on for food such as fish. They’ve triggered widespread deforestation and pollution and, ironically, contributed to greenhouse gas emissions, including methane and carbon dioxide. The arrival of workers to dam sites often drives rapid urbanization, overwhelming local infrastructure and fueling increases in violence, crime, and both mental and physical health problems. The effects leave deep, lasting scars on communities already struggling to survive.
A striking example is the Belo Monte hydroelectric complex in Pará. Its construction forcibly displaced around 40,000 people, including riverside communities (ribeirinhos) and a quarter of Altamira’s population, relocating them to remote settlements on the city’s outskirts. Igor Cavallini Johansen, a professor in the Demography Department of the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), explained: “We must reckon with the persistent inequalities created by large hydropower dams – both in the Altamira region and across the Amazon basin. This legacy of uneven development, where local communities bear the environmental and social costs while distant urban centers reap the energy benefits, demands urgent redress.”
For Maria Francineide Ferreira dos Santos, Belo Monte took more than her home. It took her paradise. Living in Paratizinho, she spoke out against the destruction, only to be forced into the city. Yet she never stopped fighting. Today, she lives in Volta Grande do Xingu, not just as a survivor, but as a fierce protector of the river and its people. She said: “All the impacts we’ve had are irreparable. The first impact was the biggest crime that Belo Monte committed in the Xingu, the death of the fish and with the displacement of its people who were born and raised in this region, who lived on the islands, without rights, without being heard, without respect, having their houses ripped out and burned, violating our rights.
Another impact was seeing our people, who didn’t understand anything, lose their homes, being moved to the city where land had exorbitant prices, not giving us the conditions to survive. The government does what it wants. This has been a losing fight. No justice has been done.” Rodolfo Salm, an ecologist, activist, and lecturer at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), who lives in Altamira, described the project’s broader consequences: “The Belo Monte hydroelectric project stands as a clear example of environmental, social and economic failure. Far from bringing prosperity, the project has left the region economically weakened and environmentally damaged. Energy production at Belo Monte is unreliable, with the Xingu River running too low for most of the year, a flaw that was well understood before construction even began.”
Johansen highlighted the irreversible damage caused by hydropower dams in biodiversity hotspots like the Amazon: “First and foremost, these projects cause irreversible ecological damage – flooding vast areas of pristine rainforest, destroying unique habitats, and potentially driving species extinction. Equally troubling is the consistent pattern of human rights violations. Indigenous and traditional communities repeatedly face displacement without proper consultation or fair compensation, as starkly demonstrated by the Belo Monte project. The climate calculus for tropical dams has also proven flawed. Rather than being clean energy solutions, their reservoirs become methane factories as submerged vegetation decomposes. This challenges the very rationale for prioritizing hydropower in rainforest regions. Perhaps the most crucial lesson is that we can no longer justify sacrificing the Amazon’s ecological and cultural wealth for questionable energy gains. The evidence clearly shows that in biodiversity hotspots, the costs of large dams nearly always outweigh the benefits – a reality that demands a fundamental shift in energy policy.” Despite this, proposals for new dams continue, often defended as essential for energy security and industrial development.
The Legislative Battlefield
Infrastructure and agribusiness expansion are growing in the Amazon and Cerrado regions alongside controversial legislative proposals. The controversial marco temporal (‘time frame’), a legal argument stating that Indigenous peoples are only entitled to lands they physically occupied on 5 October 1988, the date of Brazil’s constitution, has been fiercely debated. Indigenous organizations argue that this ignores forced displacement during the dictatorship and earlier periods. This law could undermine claims to territories not formally demarcated by 1988, opening them to exploitation. Indigenous territories remain among the most effective barriers to deforestation and degradation. Studies consistently show lower rates of forest loss inside demarcated Indigenous lands compared to surrounding areas.
Meanwhile, the ‘devastation bill’ (15.190/2025), which came into effect in February this year, introduces a self-licensing system. Companies can now obtain environmental permits by filling out online forms, bypassing environmental impact assessments. Previously, licensing could take from five to seven years, but now it may take only 12 months. This will ease large-scale infrastructure projects, such as the reconstruction of the BR-319 highway, mining, oil and gas, and dams. This bill also exempts from any licenses 13 categories of activity, ranging from road maintenance to agribusiness. Environmental law experts warn that weakening licensing at a time of expanding infrastructure could exacerbate deforestation and degradation, and increase pollution and social conflict. It’s essential to highlight that at least 40% of Indigenous lands recognized by the Brazilian state will be exposed to industrial development, deforestation, and illegal mining.
To make things worse, the Amazon Soy Moratorium (ASM), a 2006 agreement that stopped companies from buying soya grown on newly cleared Amazon forest land, is now being weakened as Brazil’s main soya industry groups, the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries (ABIOVE), and the National Association of Cereal Exporters (ANEC), step back from supporting it. These groups represent big global traders such as Cargill, Bunge, ADM, Louis Dreyfus, and COFCO, whose buying decisions strongly influence whether forests are protected. Environmental groups warn that if the agreement falls apart, it could lead to more deforestation and violation of Indigenous rights, while some UK and European supermarkets, including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Lidl, Audi, Ocado, and Waitrose, are pushing companies to keep strict no-deforestation sourcing rules.
Collective Action
Brazil finds itself at a decisive moment. On one side are promises to end illegal deforestation, to protect what remains of the forest, to act in the name of the climate. On the other are powerful interests pushing for more cattle, more soya, more mines, and more roads cutting deep into ancient lands. The language of protection is loud, but the machinery of expansion is louder. What happens in Brasília won’t stay in Brasília. The smoke rising from the Amazon doesn’t stop at national borders: it becomes part of the same air we all breathe. The pressure to clear land doesn’t begin with a chainsaw: it begins with global appetite. The steak served in Shanghai, the soya fed to livestock in Europe, the minerals inside phones in California, the wood used to build luxury hotels in the US are all tied in some way to what happens in these forests. Loans signed in financial centers far from the forest edge. We may live thousands of miles away, but our economies and our consumption are closely connected to the same fabric. The forest isn’t falling in isolation. It’s being pulled apart by a global system that rewards extraction and calls it progress. Yet this story is not finished.
There are choices that could bend the arc away from destruction. Stronger protections on soya, real zero-deforestation commitments that mean something in practice, not just on paper. Infrastructure projects refused when they threaten intact forests, environmental laws enforced as if they matter, because they really do. Indigenous territories recognized and protected, not delayed or disputed. Time and again, the evidence shows that where Indigenous peoples have secure land rights, the forest stands. But even the best national policies won’t hold back a heating planet on their own. Unless fossil fuel use drops sharply and quickly, drought and fire will intensify, and the Amazon and the Cerrado will dry from the inside out. There is a tipping point beyond which the forest cannot recover, and once crossed, no pledge or summit will bring it back.
The Amazon and the Cerrado aren’t ‘resources’. They’re living, breathing systems, vast communities of water, soil, plants, animals, and people, bound together in ways we’re only beginning to understand. They store carbon, yes, but they also hold stories, languages, medicines, songs. They regulate rain that feeds crops across South America, they cool a planet that’s running a fever. Protecting them requires more than polished speeches. It demands political courage, science that’s listened to, and a deep respect for the Indigenous and traditional communities who have defended these lands for generations, often at great personal risk. It requires confronting the uncomfortable truth that endless economic expansion on a finite planet is a contradiction.
If we fail, the consequences will be felt in failed harvests and rising food prices, in water shortages, in forced migration, in conflict over shrinking resources, in cultures and species lost forever. The unraveling of these ecosystems wouldn’t be Brazil’s tragedy alone. It would be a global reckoning. In the end, the Amazon and the Cerrado are more than policy debates or campaign slogans: they’re a measure of who we choose to be. Do we continue down a path where short-term profit outweighs human rights and ecological sanity? Or do we step into a different story, one shaped by cooperation, justice, and humility before the living world? The window is closing. The decisions made now will echo for generations. And one day, history will ask whether we defended the forest when we still had the chance, or whether we watched it burn and called it inevitable.
This Author
Monica is a Brazilian-British journalist and a member of the National Union of Journalists. She is a regular contributor to The Ecologist and publishes on Substack, Medium, and on her own platform, YourVoiz.org.
