Deforestation surges in Brazil’s sensitive Cerrado region

Deforestation in Brazil’s ecologically sensitive Cerrado biome increased by 43 per cent last year, according to official data that cast a pall over the government’s success in reducing destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

The Cerrado, a vast tropical savannah that spreads across almost a quarter of the country, stores large amounts of carbon and helps provide a buffer against climate change, according to scientists. It also operates as a giant basin to collect and distribute water resources across the continent.

The biome’s diverse mix of trees, shrubs, roots and grasslands has been increasingly under threat from the advance of agriculture, particularly soyabean and cotton farming, which has boomed in the past 30 years.

A record more than 7,800 sq km of the Cerrado were razed last year, a 43 per cent increase from the previous year, government data showed. In November alone, more than 570 sq km of land was cleared, an area three times larger than in the same month the previous year.

The figures will be a blow to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who since taking office last January has put environmental protection at the heart of his political agenda and has directed more resources to the agencies that maintain Brazil’s diverse ecosystems. The Amazon city of Belém will play host to the key UN COP30 climate summit in 2025.

In the Amazon rainforest, the approach appears to be working, with deforestation in the Brazilian section of the biome last year falling 50 per cent from the previous year. That has been largely achieved through tougher enforcement against the rainforest’s many criminal interests, including illegal loggers, ranchers and wildcat gold miners.

Lula wants to reduce deforestation in Brazil to zero by 2030, but that goal is at risk from the rising clearances in the Cerrado.

“Lula’s sacrifice of the Cerrado to beef and soy production is a major stain on his environmental credentials, and needs to be reversed and rectified urgently,” said Alex Wijeratna, senior director at campaign group Mighty Earth.

“The Cerrado savannah is being massively overlooked in Brazil and by the global community.”

The situation is complicated by environmental rules. In the Amazon, landowners are required to maintain 80 per cent of the vegetation on their land, while 20 per cent of the land can be used for commercial purposes.

But in the Cerrado, which dominates swaths of central Brazil, only 20 per cent of vegetation must typically be preserved. These looser regulations, combined with developments in farming techniques enabling crops to flourish in the climate, have propelled the advance of agriculture.

“In many cases, the suppression of native vegetation is allowed by the forest code. So, unlike the Amazon where prevention can be done via law enforcement, in the Cerrado incentives have to be created for landowners to give up their right to deforest,” said André Guimarães, executive director at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute.

The Cerrado has lost 12 per cent of its native vegetation over the past 20 years, according to government data. In November the Lula administration launched a four-year plan to reduce the destruction of the biome, with initiatives focused on government supervision and expanding protected areas.

Some environmentalists say the agricultural sector risks its own future by replacing vegetation with cropland, since this undermines the process of evapotranspiration, in which water evaporates into the atmosphere from soil. This leads to a reduction in rainfall, which can imperil harvests.

Gabriel Hofmann, a researcher at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, said: “If there is a lack of water in the Cerrado, this will have strong repercussions on other regions of Brazil, both for the supply of water to the population and for the production of hydropower, the main form of electricity production.”

André Lima, secretary for deforestation control at the environment ministry, said reducing the destruction of the Cerrado would be its “top priority” and “biggest challenge” this year.

“Legal deforestation is much more difficult to control because the law allows it. There is no way to punish what the law authorises.”

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