In 2023, more than 93% of the deforested area in Brazil had at least one indication of illegality. In the Cerrado, which took the lead in deforestation in Brazil last year, this percentage was slightly lower, with 9.23% of the area deforested in the biome in 2023 having no signs of illegality. Both figures show a slight drop in relation to the average of the last five years, when only 4% of all the deforested area in Brazil showed no signs of illegality or irregularity.
>> Access the main highlights of RAD 2023
Within Legal Reserves (LR) alone, Brazil has lost more than 1.2 million hectares of native vegetation in the last five years. This corresponds to 14.2% of the entire area deforested in the country in the period. In the last year, the biome with the biggest increase in deforested area within RL was the Cerrado: an increase of 136%, totaling more than 136,000 hectares.
The Annual Report on Deforestation 2023 also looked at the percentage of alerts that had some kind of enforcement action. Four states and the Federal District were below 2% of the area inspected: DF: 0%; Rondônia: 0.05%; Mato Grosso do Sul: 0.7%; Pernambuco: 1.16%; and Maranhão: 1.29%. Only four states have percentages above 50%: Espírito Santo: 90.53%; Paraná: 66.32%; Rio de Janeiro: 55.19%; and Goiás: 54.19%.
Cerrado: Matopiba overtakes the Amazon and takes the lead in deforestation in Brazil
Of the total areas deforested since 2019, only 41.7% have had either authorization or enforcement action, which means that 58.3% have not yet been enforced. This rate represents an improvement on the last report published in 2023, which indicated authorization or enforcement action in 35% of the area deforested since 2019.
RAD 2023: Deforestation decreased in Amazonian states; check the situation in the biomes
In 2023, Operação Mata Atlântica em Pé reported the monitoring of 1,399 alerts in 17 states, allowing the identification of almost 18,000 hectares of illegal deforestation, an increase of 49% over the previous year's edition.
Cerrado also leads deforestation in protected territories
New EU regulations
The European Union's new regulation on the import of commodities (European Union Deforestation-Free Regulation) comes into force on December 30, 2024 and one of the prohibitions is the purchase of products from forest areas cleared after December 31, 2020. MapBiomas Alert has identified 208,522 alerts, with a total area of 4,885,688 hectares of native vegetation conversion, whose before images are from January 1, 2021. The high-resolution image proves that these areas were native vegetation until the deadline established in the rule. More than half (57.3%) of this deforested area was in forest formations and 38.5% in savannah formations. This restriction could affect around 230,000 rural properties (3.1% of the 7.5 million properties registered with the CAR).