The ideals of forest champions like Lula have given way to local political concerns, weakening their ability to act as the climate’s emergency brake

By David Fickling / Bloomberg Opinion

Whatever happened to the savior of the Amazon?

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva once had a decent claim to that title. Deforestation decreased by about 80 percent during his first term in office from 2003 to 2011, driving a stunning 39 percent fall in emissions in a country whose carbon pollution is shaped above all by the state of its boundless jungles.

At COP30 next month — the UN’s annual climate meeting, hosted this year in the port city of Belem at the gateway to Brazil’s rainforest — he has promised to put forward “Amazonian solutions for climate change.” Last month, he pitched US$1 billion into a planned US$125 billion global fund to preserve tropical woodlands.

Illustration: Constance Chou

“It is possible to make the forest worth more while standing than cut down,” he told a recent meeting in Bogota.

It is a nice line, but the data tell a different story. Last year, about 4.4 million hectares were lost in Brazil, including 2.8 million of untouched primary land. That is the third-largest annual figure this century, and comfortably more than in any year under former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who reveled in the nickname “Captain Chainsaw.”

Degradation — which includes damage and thinning out of existing woodland, as well as wholesale removal of entire stands — also rose to the highest level in two decades last year. About 6.64 million hectares were affected, an area about the size of Ireland. Average annual losses of primary forest during Lula’s first two years were about 24 percent higher than during Bolsonaro’s administration.

It is possible to quibble about the extent that Lula is responsible. More than half of the loss last year came as a result of fires, rather than logging. While almost all of these were started by humans, the damage they do can be dependent on environmental factors. In 2023 and last year, the Amazon basin was gripped by its most severe drought in more than 40 years, quickly turning blazes into infernos.

Lula’s record also looks better if you confine your focus just to the Amazon, as opposed to the enormous, but less charismatic areas of savannah and wetlands to the east and south such as the Cerrado and Pantanal. Deforestation in the legal Amazon this year, despite running far above levels during Lula’s first administration, remains well below the rates of the Bolsonaro era.

The rainforest and global climate do not care about such rationalizations. On plenty of areas under his control, Lula has fallen short.

Last year’s devastating fires likely worsened thanks to a strike by the country’s environment agencies, whose workers are often the first line of defense against deforestation. Brazil’s government took eight months to resolve the issue. State-owned Petrobras SA recently won approval to drill for oil in an offshore area not far from the mouth of the Amazon river. In August, Lula signed a law radically loosening environmental protections, even as he vetoed some of the most egregious measures. The amount of land given over to soybeans and corn would hit record levels this year.

For all of Bolsonaro’s lawlessness, there is an uncomfortable degree of continuity between the two administrations. Lula’s ability to get things done depends on working together with more than a dozen parties in the Brazilian Congress, where rural electorates dominated by agribusiness are grossly over-represented and Bolsonaro allies still hold sway. Sacrificing the Cerrado to save the Amazon is central to that devil’s bargain.

Nor is the problem confined just to Brazil. In many parts of the world where forests have recently spread to their widest extent in centuries, their potential to offset our emissions is running out. In Finland, one of the world’s most tree-covered countries, woodlands have become net emitters since 2021, as logging caught up with planting and a warming climate released carbon from the soil.

Russia and Canada lost more tree cover than Brazil last year, as fires swept through boreal forests that were immune in a cooler climate. Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto wants to expand palm oil plantations, sugarcane fields and dairy farms. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) promised increase to China’s woods over the next decade would be enough to offset about five months’ worth of the country’s emissions. New plantings have slowed over the past decade, the Food and Agriculture Organization wrote last week.

This backsliding is going to make all our efforts to avert the worst outcomes of climate change more difficult. Long before the recent backing away from commitments in the US, Europe and elsewhere, hopes to slow a freefall toward a warmer planet still depended heavily on the prospects of sucking up atmospheric carbon by planting more trees — the “net” bit in “net zero.”

As world leaders gather in Belem next month, they would need to reckon with the fact that this parachute is looking worryingly threadbare. Trees, soils, plants and oceans have for decades been slowing the damage our industrial civilization is doing to the climate. Their ability to act as an emergency brake is weakening. Forests and erstwhile forest champions like Lula are not going to save us anymore.

David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy. Previously, he worked for Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.