Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon biome fell by 23.5% in 2025 compared with 2024, according to a new report from MapBiomas, a Brazil-based land-use mapping project.
Reductions in deforestation were recorded across the board in all of Brazil’s biomes, culminating in a 21% nationwide decrease in forest loss. In total, nearly 985,000 hectares (2.4 million acres) of forested land was cut down in 2025, the report found. Of this, 289,478 hectares (715,315 acres) was deforested in the Amazon.
The decline in deforestation likely reflects a combination of stronger environmental enforcement, improved satellite monitoring and growing market demands for sustainable production, Nathalia Crusco, a researcher with MapBiomas, wrote to Mongabay.
Only 5% of deforested land overlapped with enforcement actions or clearing authorizations in 2019, compared with 65% over the 2019-2025 period, she added, based on MapBiomas data.
Deforestation also fell by nearly 17% in the Cerrado savanna, where agriculture expansion is most aggressive. More than half of the Cerrado’s native vegetation has already been cleared. And while the rate of deforestation in the Cerrado declined, the majority of forest clearing in Brazil, 55%, took place in the Cerrado savanna, the report said.
Much of the reduction in deforestation was within Indigenous territories. Clear-cut deforestation on Indigenous lands in the Brazilian Amazon fell by 25% in 2025, according to a technical memo shared with Mongabay by Brazil’s Indigenous agency, Funai. Funai’s Remote Monitoring Center compiled the recent report. A total of 30,128 hectares (74,450 acres) of clear-cutting on Indigenous land was recorded last year, compared to 40,178 hectares (99,280 acres) in 2024.
“We’ve verified a significant reduction,” the authors of the report wrote. “The [clear-cutting deforestation] 2025 data are the lowest since 2016.”
Despite the overall decline, sharp increases were recorded on some Indigenous lands. In the Batelão Indigenous territory, in the state of Mato Grosso, clear-cut deforestation increased by roughly 10,000%, from around 5.5 hectares (13 acres) in 2024 to more than 567 hectares (1,400 acres) in 2025.
In December 2025, one of the leaders of the Batelão territory told Mongabay that Indigenous people could not access their land, that it had been taken over by soy, cotton and corn farms, as well as pastures.
“We want Terra Batelão back. We are fighting for it, but there are only promises — and so far, nothing,” Indigenous representative Porokó Kayabi told Mongabay Brasil.
In the Pantanal, the world’s largest and most biodiverse wetland, deforestation fell by nearly half between 2024 and 2025, and nearly 80%, if compared to 2023 levels. MapBiomas satellite monitoring detected around 12,260 hectares (30,300 acres) of deforested land in the Pantanal biome in 2025, an area slightly larger than the city of Barcelona in Spain.
Much of the Pantanal deforestation in 2024 can be traced back to huge wildfires that scorched habitat for jaguars (Panthera onca), hyacinth macaws (Anodorhynchus hyacinthinus) and caimans, among many more species.
Banner image: Soy plantations amid savanna vegetation in Maranhão state, Brazil. Image courtesy of Fernando Frazão/Agência Brasil.
This story first appeared on Mongabay
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