In the midst of a “heartbreaking” climate change conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, last month, there was one strikingly positive number that was largely drowned out by the finance negotiations: Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon has decreased by 30.6% in the last year — the highest decline in nine years.
“I think that when we finish 2024, overall deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon will be between 60% and 65% less than deforestation in 2022,” said Carlos Nobre, a leading climate scientist in Brazil who worked at the country’s deforestation monitoring institute for 30 years and is the architect of the Amazon 4.0 initiative, a sustainable development model for the region.
Brazil’s success is helping it make the case for increased international funding and support not only for battling deforestation, but for maintaining those gains. Over the course of the next year, we will see Brazil push harder for the creation of the Tropical Forest Finance Facility, or TFFF, which would get money flowing to countries that can keep forests standing.
About the author
Jesse Chase-Lubitz
Jesse Chase-Lubitz covers climate change and multilateral development banks for Devex. She previously worked at Nature Magazine, where she received a Pulitzer grant for an investigation into land reclamation. She has written for outlets such as Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and The Japan Times, among others. Jesse holds a master’s degree in Environmental Policy and Regulation from the London School of Economics.
