Lula da Silva's environmental policies were on display as Inpe (Brazil's national institute for space research) reported the lowest recorded annual rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon at 3,335 sq km in the period ending July 2026. This was 42% lower than the 2024-2025 rate.
“It is a monumental decline,” said Environment Minister Joao Paulo Capobianco, describing the record low as the latest of several milestones that show the correlation between rain and farm production in southern Brazil.
Prodes reports the deforestation has decreased every year since 2022. For a cumulative decrease of 71.2% in four years.
In the Cerrado savannah, losses of native vegetation also fell to its lowest levels at 5,517 sq km, 23.8% below 2001 levels. The current rate puts Brazil on pace to hit Lula's goal of net-zero illegal deforestation by 2030.
UFPR Research
Federal University of Parana (UFPR) researchers published their findings on how the Amazon region’s activities have consequences for southern parts of Brazil in the form of rainfall, agriculture, and hydroelectricity.
For their research, which appeared in the July 2017 edition of the Brazilian Journal of Biology, the study analyzed the Iguaçu River basin’s rainfall data. Researchers correlated this data, which spanned from 2011 through the end of 2023, with data on forest losses that occurred in the Amazon region over the same period, sourced from INPE and Imazon.
Researchers identified a positive correlation between higher levels of forest loss in the Amazon and decreased rainfall in the Iguaçu River basin.
They said the findings were a correlation and that droughts in the region can also be explained by factors outside of forest loss in the Amazon. These factors include other atmospheric phenomena, as well as El Niño and La Niña.
Acording to study co-author Ana Carolina da Silva, up to 40% of the rainfall in Parana originates from the Amazon, owing to moisture from the forest region that is then transported over that region.
“It is not correct to view the Amazon as something isolated in the country’s north. Its impact stretches as far as all of South America, including Parana,” she told G1.
Trees draw water and release it as vapors. Low-level jets take those vapors, also called flying rivers, over the continents. Once they meet the Andes, the air flow goes partly south, then southeast.
Flying rivers over Brazil provide water for agriculture, hydropower generation, and other uses. Flying rivers, in essence, provide a transportation system to transfer rain to different regions.
Flying rivers bring moisture, which can come from lakes or other land sources, and from the Amazon region of Brazil. There, vegetation transports and releases significant moisture into the atmosphere. Then, low-level atmospheric jets transfer this moisture across the country in the form of flying rivers, which bring rain to the Midwest, South and Southeast regions of Brazil.
For example, there are areas of the South and Southeast where flying rivers bring essential moisture to agriculture and hydropower production, especially for the generation of energy.
The study's concluded that Amazon deforestation is not a problem confined to the north of Brazil: by altering the moisture flows that reach the south, forest clearing amplifies risks for farmers, consumers, reservoirs and the power system.
Politics of Environmental Catastrophe
Paradoxically, the Brazilian agribusiness sector supports the candidacy of Flávio Bolsonaro, who served as the rapporteur for the “beach privatization” constitutional amendment (PEC), and who has backed the abolition of legal reserves, the reduction of protected areas, the dismantling of environmental licensing, and more. Flávio’s father — currently imprisoned for an attempted coup d’état — revoked 401 executive branch acts that provided environmental protection.
All these instances of deregulation championed by Bolsonarism place Brazilian agribusiness at extreme risk, as they profoundly alter rainfall patterns, and are a major concern for organizations involved in environmental protection. In a sense, a portion of the Brazilian agribusiness sector supports the very candidate who poses the greatest risk to that same sector.
