More than half of the entire area deforested in Brazil in 2023 occurred in the Cerrado, mainly in the Matopiba region between Bahia, Piauí, Tocantins and Maranhão; the latter took the lead among the states that deforested the most last year
In the last five years, Brazil has lost 8,558,237 hectares of native vegetation, the equivalent of twice the size of the state of Rio de Janeiro. However, 2023 represented a turning point in this process, according to data from the most recent edition of MapBiomas' RAD - Annual Report on Deforestation in Brazil. Firstly, because there was an 11.6% drop in the area deforested: in total, 1,829,597 hectares of native vegetation were cleared in 2023; in 2022, this total was 2,069,695 hectares. This reduction occurred despite an 8.7% increase in the number of alerts compared to 2022.
>> Access the main highlights of RAD 2023
Brazil's two largest biomes - the Amazon and the Cerrado - account for more than 85% of the country's total deforested area. But For the first time since the MapBiomas Alert series began in 2019, the Cerrado overtook the Amazon in terms of deforested area. In 2023, the Cerrado accounted for 61% of the deforested area across the country and the Amazon for 25%. There were 1,110,326 hectares deforested in the Cerrado in 2023, an increase of 68% compared to 2022. Almost all of the country's deforestation (97%) was driven by agricultural expansion.
>Cerrado also leads deforestation in protected territories
Together, four Cerrado states - Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia, which make up the region known as Matopiba - surpassed the area deforested in the Amazon states and accounted for almost half (47%) of all the loss of native vegetation in the country last year. There were 858,952 hectares - an increase of 59% compared to 2022, which had already seen an increase (36%) compared to 2021. Three out of every four hectares deforested in the Cerrado in 2023 (74%) were in Matopiba. Two-thirds (33) of the 50 municipalities with the most deforestation in Brazil in 2023 are in the Cerrado, and all 10 municipalities with the largest deforested area in the Cerrado in 2023 are located in Matopiba.
“The data shows the first drop in deforestation in Brazil since 2019, when the RAD began to be published. On the other hand, the face of deforestation is changing in Brazil, concentrating in biomes where savannah and grassland formations predominate and reducing in forest formations,” says Tasso Azevedo, MapBiomas coordinator.
RAD 2023: Deforestation reduced in the Amazon states; see the situation in the biomes
Evidence of illegality in deforested areas prevails from the north to the south of Brazil
Of the four Matopiba states, only Piauí saw a reduction in deforested area. In the others - Bahia, Tocantins and Maranhão - the deforested area grew. Maranhão moved from fifth to first place for the first time, with an increase of 95.1% and a total loss of 331,225 hectares of native vegetation. In the case of Tocantins, the increase was 177.9%. With 230,253 hectares deforested, the state was the third largest deforester in the country in 2023, behind Bahia, with 290,606 hectares and an increase of 27.5% compared to 2022. The ranking of the five states with the largest deforested areas in Brazil includes two historical leaders - Pará and Mato Grosso - but with an inverted sign: a drop of 60.3% in the former and 32.1% in the latter. Deforestation in Pará amounted to 184,763 hectares; in Mato Grosso, 161,381 hectares.
This change was also reflected in the type of vegetation suppressed. In 2023, for the first time, there was a predominance of deforestation in savannah formations (54.8%) followed by forest formations (38.5%) which predominated in the first four years of the survey.
Amazon: 8 trees deforested per second
In 2023, the average area deforested per day was 5,013 hectares - or 228 hectares per hour. More than half of this was in the Cerrado, where 3,042 hectares of native vegetation were lost per day. In the Amazon, 1,245 hectares were lost per day, which is equivalent to around 8 trees per second.. O dia com maior área desmatada em 2023 foi 15 de fevereiro, quando em apenas 24 horas estima-se que foi desmatada uma área equivalente a quase seis mil campos de futebol.
It should be noted that in the Cerrado, in addition to the detection systems already used in previous years, the SAD Cerrado alert detection system (IPAM) was also incorporated into operations. Therefore, the increase in the Cerrado is due to the increase in deforestation, the improvement of detection systems and the integration of a new detection source.
TheAlthough only 0.96% of the properties registered in the CAR had a record of deforestation in 2023 in Brazil, they accounted for 89% of the country's deforested areas. Of the total of 71,689 properties registered in the CAR with validated deforestation in 2023, 43.1% were repeat offenders, i.e. they had already registered deforestation in previous years.
In order to estimate how much of Brazil's deforestation has no signs of irregularity or illegality, each alert is evaluated according to certain criteria, such as whether there is an authorization registered in the official databases, or whether there is an overlap with protected areas (e.g. Integral Protection Conservation Unit, Legal Reserve, Permanent Preservation Area). Considering authorizations from states that have made data publicly available, the RAD identified that 4.04% of the entire area deforested in Brazil in the last five years has no signs of illegality or irregularity, according to the databases available for analysis. For the year 2023, more than 93% of the deforested area in Brazil had at least one indication of irregularity.
