Brazil’s administration has trumpeted sharp progress in slowing Amazon deforestation, and preliminary figures reviewed by the Associated Press suggest the country is headed for its lowest annual rate since at least 2012. But foresters, climate researchers and environmental advocates say the main risk is shifting from clearing trees to degrading forests through repeated disturbances. They describe wildfires, logging and drought as pressures that can weaken ecosystems even while large-scale deforestation declines.
In the AP story, experts say that forest degradation—areas damaged by human activity where soil is exposed but the forest has not been fully lost—now affects a large share of the Amazon. That degradation has continued to expand as compared with clear-cutting, and it could be intensified by climate conditions tied to El Nino, a periodic warming of the equatorial Pacific that tends to bring hotter, drier weather to the region.
“Degradation is slower and more silent. It is like a chronic condition,” Taciana Stec, a climate policy specialist at Talanoa, said in the AP report. The concern, researchers say, is that chronic weakening can reduce the Amazon’s ability to absorb emissions and resist future shocks, including fire and drought. While the Amazon is still described as a carbon sink—absorbing substantial amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide—scientists warn it could reach a tipping point where it emits more carbon than it absorbs.
Scientists also connect El Nino to the fire and heat dynamics that have previously driven severe wildfire seasons. During the 2023 and 2024 El Nino periods, temperatures in the region rose 2 to 4 Celsius above historical averages, which the AP report says was associated with severe drought and fueled the Amazon’s worst wildfires in two decades. The report says forest degradation during those periods increased at roughly three times the rate of deforestation decline.
The AP story points to a 2024 study published in Nature that estimated that by 2050 between 10% and 47% of the Amazon could be pushed into conditions capable of triggering a critical shift. It also cites research by Guilherme Mataveli of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, or INPE, that found a net loss of rainforest that undermined deforestation progress, reflecting the combined effects of disturbances and climate stress. Experts say the “degraded rainforest may still be standing” but can lose its capacity to fully support the ecosystem.
The report describes how monitoring works in Brazil. The country’s official annual deforestation rate covers a period from August of the previous year to July of the current year, and preliminary data based on DETER, Brazil’s satellite-based system for alerts, show that both deforestation and forest degradation have declined since last year. However, it says degradation continues to outpace deforestation: from August 2025 through April 2026, deforestation alerts covered nearly 1,700 square kilometers (656 square miles), while degradation affected about 4,420 square kilometers (1,706 square miles).
The AP story also lays out the political stakes of satellite enforcement as Brazil turns toward fire season. A fast-tracked bill proposed by lawmaker Lucio Mosquini would prohibit IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental enforcement agency, from imposing sanctions on landowners for illegal deforestation based solely on satellite monitoring. Mosquini said satellite-based sanctions harm farmers because they are not given a chance to mount a defense, though the AP report says authorities respond that farmers can challenge sanctions within 20 days and have them overturned if they can show the deforestation was authorized.
IBAMA began relying on satellite data in 2016 to complement field inspections, according to the report. The AP says Bolsonaro’s administration halted the policy in 2019 as part of environmental deregulation efforts, and deforestation rates later rose to a 15-year high in 2021. Under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the AP report says the remote monitoring resumed, and officials warned that limiting satellite-based enforcement would weaken deterrence.
Jair Schmitt, IBAMA’s president, told the AP that the change would be “a major environmental setback.” He said the proposal would “in effect, you end up encouraging environmental offenders and unfair competition,” arguing that satellite technology supports enforcement much like speed cameras assist traffic authorities. “It would be impossible for a city to deploy a guard to every corner,” he said, and he added that the federal government cannot station agents across every square kilometer of rainforest.
With El Nino-related warnings in the background, Brazilian authorities have moved to prepare for what could be a bad wildfire season. In March, the government announced hiring 4,600 firefighters and launching real-time monitoring for potential fire outbreaks, the AP report says. Schmitt said officials identified rural properties at high fire risk by combining historical heat-spot data with deforestation and weather records, and that some landowners were notified and ordered to adopt preventive measures.
Tainan Kumaruara, a member of the Indigenous volunteer Guardioes Kumaruara fire brigade in Para state, told the AP: “The situation this year is worrying. We’re still in the rainy season, and we’ve already recorded two fires in April.” She added, “The forest is different from what it was 10 years ago. It’s much drier. The trees no longer behave as they did.”
The AP report also cites MapBiomas, a nonprofit that tracks land use, saying the 2024 wildfire season fueled by severe drought affected more than 17 million hectares (42 million acres) of rainforest, and that most Amazon wildfires are human-started rather than natural. It adds that a study published in April in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that after frequent wildfires, the forest did not completely disappear or transform into savanna. Instead, the AP report says the forest remained a rainforest but degraded—becoming more vulnerable and lacking some niche species that depend on dense cover and time.
Leandro Maracahipes, a Yale University researcher supported by the Brazilian nonprofit Instituto Serrapilheira, told the AP: “The forest is resilient, but our message is that we need to preserve it even more, and urgently,” adding, “And it has to be now.”