Amazon fires fall sharply, but the forest is not out of danger

For once, the Amazon has produced a number that does not read like an environmental obituary. MapBiomas says 3.1 million hectares burned in Brazil’s Amazon in 2025, down from 15.8 million hectares a year earlier. That is the smallest burned area recorded since the group began its monitoring in 1985, which is encouraging, provided nobody mistakes a single better year for a solved problem.

The figures matter in Brasília as much as they do in the forest. Protecting the Amazon was one of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s campaign pledges four years ago, and the latest data will inevitably be treated as a political gain for him. On his first day in office, on 1 January 2023, Lula said his goal was zero deforestation in the Amazon. Environmental groups welcomed that promise, which is easy enough; the harder part is making it stick.

MapBiomas said the improvement was not limited to the rainforest itself. Across Brazil, around 12.7 million hectares burned in 2025, down from 30 million in 2024. The country’s highest recorded figure remains 2007, when 30.7 million hectares burned. Vera Arruda, a researcher at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute and coordinator at MapBiomas, said the 2025 figures show it is possible to reduce the burned area in the country. She added that the 31% drop compared with the historical average, driven mainly by the lowest number of fires recorded in the Amazon in 41 years, is positive news, but not enough to conclude that the pattern has become permanent or to ease prevention efforts.

That caution is hardly decorative. The drop partly reflects the easing of the extraordinary fires seen in 2024, helped by cooler La Niña conditions rather than the warmer El Niño pattern. MapBiomas also warned that El Niño, which raises global temperatures, could prolong the dry season and increase the risk of forest fires. Weather is a stubborn thing; it rarely respects political messaging.

The deeper pressures on the Amazon have not disappeared. Decades of deliberate land clearance for agriculture and logging have left their mark, and climate change can create conditions in which bigger fires spread more easily. Tropical rainforests such as the Amazon are home to millions of species and, when healthy, absorb vast quantities of carbon dioxide, helping to keep the planet cooler. When they burn, that quiet service is interrupted with predictable consequences.

The political backdrop remains awkward for Lula. He promised to reverse the deforestation that accelerated under Jair Bolsonaro, who argued that more farming and mining in the Amazon would reduce poverty in the region. Environmentalists accused Bolsonaro of allowing deforestation to speed up, and three years into his four-year term the amount of trees cut down in the Amazon had risen by 75%. Lula’s early pledge of zero deforestation won applause; his approval of oil exploration at the mouth of the Amazon river has drawn criticism from activists who say it clashes with that promise.

So the latest numbers offer Lula some room to breathe, but not a clean victory. They show that fewer fires are possible and that policy still matters when conditions are not working against it. They do not show that the Amazon is safe, or that the incentives to strip it for land and profit have vanished. In that sense, the forest has improved its statistics, not its fate.

Written by Thomas Nussbaumer thomas.nussbaumer@alpineweekly.com