Brazil faces two contrasting legacies for the Amazon in October’s elections

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• Polls indicate that Brazil’s presidential election in October will go to a runoff between incumbent Jair Bolsonaro and former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in a duel likely to decide the fate of the Amazon Rainforest.
• While Bolsonaro doubles down his climate change denialism and anti-Indigenous agenda, Lula vows to tackle deforestation and eject criminals from the Amazon.
• Under Bolsonaro, the Brazilian Amazon has lost an area of forest larger than Belgium and recorded its highest deforestation rate in the last 15 years.
• Lula’s policies helped reduce annual deforestation by 82%, to the lowest rate recorded since satellite monitoring began.

Brazil has lost a Belgium-sized swath of the Amazon Rainforest since Jair Bolsonaro took office as the country’s president at the start of 2019. Deforestation has soared under his administration, which critics accuse of slashing funding for environmental agencies and pushing an agenda of undisguised climate change denialism and anti-Indigenous policies. According to official data released in August, the rate of deforestation in Earth’s largest rainforest is on track to rival last year’s 15-year high.

Bolsonaro is running for reelection in October, where he’s expected to face off against former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the second round. Polls show Lula in the lead. As far as the Amazon goes, then, the choice between the two men who have both held the highest office in Brazil boils down not just to different policies for the future, but two contrasting legacies on the Amazon.

In his eight years as president, from 2003 to 2010, Lula adopted policies that slowed the rate of tropical forest loss. Deforestation declined by 82%, from 27,772 to 4,571 square kilometers (10,723 to 1,765 square miles) between 2004 and 2012, when Lula’s successor and ally, Dilma Rousseff, was in power. The 2012 figure was the lowest rate recorded since satellite monitoring began in 1988. Under Bolsonaro, deforestation rates have increased by nearly 60%.

From August 2021 to July 2022, 10,781 km2 (4,163 mi2) of rainforest were cut down, an area the size of the U.S. state of Massachusetts. That’s the highest rate in the last 15 years, and puts 2022 on track to be the fourth consecutive year with deforestation of more than 10,000 km2 (3,900 mi2) — a streak not seen since 2008.

The current deforestation rate is pushing the Amazon to what scientists call a “point of no return,” beyond which the rainforest won’t be able to recover on its own and turn into a dry savanna, in the process emitting more planet-warming greenhouse gases than it absorbs them. This scenario is already happening in heavily deforested parts of the Brazilian Amazon.

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