“In recent years, deforestation and logging rates in the Amazon rainforest have accelerated, and the spatial patterns of forest loss in the Amazon rainforest have changed.”

INPE’s PRODES system presents annual deforestation rates for the Legal Amazon since 1988. Recent published series show that deforestation increased strongly between 2019 and 2022, exceeding 10,000 km² per year, and then declined in 2023 and 2024 to levels around 6,000 km². These data indicate a reversal of the accelerated deforestation observed during 2019–2022, with a significant reduction in the most recent years of the series.

The Amazon forest has recently experienced substantial human-induced loss of forest cover. Using satellite observations and atmospheric moisture tracking from 1980–2019, the authors find that widespread deforestation is strongly associated with reduced precipitation across the southern Amazon basin. The study also states that climate models underestimate the sensitivity of precipitation to deforestation, implying greater risk from continued forest loss.

The IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land notes that in the Brazilian Amazon, ‘deforestation rates declined substantially after 2004 due to improved monitoring and enforcement, though rates have fluctuated since and increased again in the second half of the 2010s.’ It emphasizes that while deforestation remains a major concern, the long‑term record is characterized by periods of both increase and decrease rather than a simple monotonic acceleration. The report focuses on emissions and land‑use drivers globally and does not provide a detailed analysis of changing intra‑Amazon spatial patterns of forest loss in the most recent years.

Brazil substantially reduced primary forest loss in 2025 and saw its lowest level of non-fire primary forest loss on record. Outside of primary rainforests, most other Brazilian biomes also saw reduced tree cover loss, except the Caatinga, which increased by 9%. Amazonia and the Pantanal had the largest reductions of tree cover loss from 2024 to 2025. Globally, fires were again a major driver of tree cover loss in 2025, consistent with recent trends. For the past three years, fires burned more than twice as much tree cover as they did two decades ago.

Using Landsat imagery, NASA documents how deforestation in the Brazilian state of Rondônia evolved from ‘a few isolated clearings in 1975’ to a fishbone pattern along roads in the 1980s and 1990s, and then to ‘large, consolidated blocks of cleared land’ by the 2000s. The narrative emphasizes that the spatial pattern of forest loss changed over time as road building and settlement policies opened up new areas, with logging and clearing expanding along transportation corridors and then outward into the surrounding forest.

Tropical rainforest loss fell 36% in 2025 from the record high of 2024, according to new data from the University of Maryland’s GLAD Lab, available on World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Watch platform and Global Nature Watch. The biggest decline in primary rainforest loss occurred in Brazil, where non-fire-related forest loss in the Amazon dropped 42% from 2024 levels. In contrast, several other countries saw increases, underscoring that while 2025 marked a sharp decrease from 2024’s extreme loss, overall loss remains high and progress is uneven.

The original algorithm used to map tree cover loss from satellite images for 2001-2012 has been improved upon in subsequent updates. These improvements allowed for annual updates starting in 2013 (coupled with small additions to the 2011 and 2012 data) and have resulted in enhanced detection of loss — particularly from 2015 onwards. The Landsat 8 satellite has the same resolution as previous Landsat missions, but has an improved sensor that can better resolve features on the ground. Incorporation of Landsat 8 data into the loss algorithm resulted in better detections of tree cover loss smaller than an individual pixel (e.g. selective logging) starting in 2013. Certain areas benefitted more than others from these improvements — the Brazilian Amazon and Indonesia are dominated by large-scale clearing and so loss was already well captured by the initial algorithm, while West and Central Africa, Southeast Asia, and other areas with smaller-scale forest clearing were more affected by the improvements.

Global Forest Change (GFC) provides a widely accessible tool for monitoring tree cover loss and is frequently used by both professionals and the public to quantify deforestation. Our assessment across multiple sites in the Brazilian Amazon shows that GFC tree cover loss detections are generally accurate, with user’s accuracies for loss typically exceeding 85%. The challenges of visually identifying minor loss patches on Sentinel-2 imagery are consistent with the findings of Castillo et al. (2022), who reported an overall accuracy of 83% in classifying selective logging in the Amazon when compared with very-high-resolution UAV imagery, but only 35% accuracy in classifying disturbed canopy. In this light, the GFC tree cover loss data are remarkably accurate, considering that they are based on coarser Landsat imagery and the detection algorithm is trained to work globally.

Analyzing basin-wide datasets from 2001–2020, the study concludes that “the frontier of rapid forest loss has migrated from the ‘Arc of Deforestation’ in southern Brazil to new hotspots in the eastern and western Amazon.” It documents “a transition from large-scale clearings associated with cattle expansion to more dispersed, medium-sized clearings linked to soy cultivation, logging roads and land speculation,” demonstrating that “the spatial configuration of deforestation has changed even in periods when aggregate annual rates appeared stable.”

The tropics lost 12.2 million hectares of tree cover in 2020, according to new data from the University of Maryland and available on Global Forest Watch. The majority of humid primary forest loss in the country occurred in the Brazilian Amazon, which saw a 15% increase from last year, for a total of 1.5 million hectares. Newly cleared patches are particularly prevalent along the Amazon’s southern and eastern edges (known as the ‘arc of deforestation’) and along highways bisecting the Amazon rainforest. Scientists fear that fires and associated emissions may increase in the future as climate change and further deforestation dry out forests and make them more vulnerable to fire. The resulting positive feedback loop could potentially transform the Amazon into a savannah.

The article reports that “after a five-year lull, deforestation rates are again on the rise in the Legal Amazon (INPE 2011).” It explains that between 2004 and 2009 deforestation fell dramatically, but “more recent satellite data indicate that the downward trend has reversed, with annual cleared areas increasing once more,” illustrating how deforestation rates can accelerate again after periods of decline.

New data on GFW shows drivers of tree cover loss at 1-kilometer resolution, providing the most detailed view of drivers yet. Previous 10-km drivers data (Curtis et al., 2018) mapped global drivers of tree cover loss for 2001-2023 at 10-km resolution. New 1-km drivers data (Sims et al. 2025) map global drivers for 2001-2024 at 1-km resolution and will be updated annually with new tree cover loss data. The new data detects selective logging, fires and flooding for hydropower in the Ouésso District of the Republic of Congo. The previous data in the same location classifies all loss as shifting agriculture. This analysis demonstrates how the higher level of spatial detail in the new map provides useful contextual information for users to understand the nature of tree cover loss in their local area of interest, for example better characterizing selective logging in the tropics and differentiating permanent agriculture from shifting cultivation.

OTCA says Amazon deforestation fell by 68% in 2025 and forest degradation fell by 48% according to the Amazon Regional Observatory. This provides a counterpoint showing that recent annual deforestation rates did not accelerate everywhere in the basin in that year.

MAAP reports that in 2024 ‘deforestation was the fifth highest on record (since 2002), at over 1.7 million hectares across the Amazon,’ a 34% increase from 2023 and only 12% below the recent peak in 2022. The article notes that ‘most of the intense forest loss hotspots were due to fire,’ concentrated in the soy and cattle frontiers of the southeast Brazilian Amazon and southeast Bolivian Amazon, while deforestation hotspots without major fires were linked to agriculture and gold mining across Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. These descriptions indicate both elevated recent loss and shifting spatial patterns tied to new frontiers and land‑use types.

This project is focused on developing global tree cover change data products based on Landsat satellite imagery, which will be available for display and analysis on the Global Forest Watch (GFW) platform. The GLAD team at the University of Maryland produces annual global maps of tree cover loss and gain at 30-meter resolution, including for the Amazon basin, enabling detailed assessment of the rate and spatial pattern of deforestation and logging over time.

“Legal Amazon lost 6,288 km² between August 2023 and July 2024, the lowest result in 9 years, according to official data from PRODES-INPE. The annual deforestation rate in the Legal Amazon for 2024 was 6,288 km², a drop of 30.6% compared to the previous period.” … “In contrast, the federal administration in the previous period had promoted an unprecedented dismantling of environmental control and governance bodies – which resulted in annual rates above 10,000 km² between 2019 and 2022.”

From 2001 to 2025, there was a total of 540 million hectares of tree cover loss globally, equivalent to 14% of the 2000 tree cover area, and 230 gigatonnes of CO₂ emissions. This dashboard allows users to explore trends in tree cover loss by country and biome, including the Amazon, and to compare annual rates over time, revealing periods when deforestation accelerated or slowed as well as shifts in where loss is occurring.

Global Forest Watch’s interactive map lets users explore the state of forests worldwide by analyzing tree cover change using satellite data. By zooming into the Amazon rainforest, users can visualize where tree cover loss has occurred year by year since 2001, observe how frontiers of clearing have expanded along roads and rivers, and see how the spatial patterns of forest loss have shifted over time between different parts of the basin.

“From August 2020 through July 2021, INPE’s Amazon Deforestation Monitoring Project (PRODES) recorded deforested areas in the Amazon totaling 13,235 km². This was an increase of 21.97% in the rate of forest destruction compared to the same time period in the previous year, when 10,851 km² were deforested.” … “From January through July 2022, the highest rate of deforestation ever for the first months of the year was recorded, according to data from INPE, with an area of forest five times the size of New York City deforested in the Amazon during that span.”

The page states that deforestation has claimed over 185 million acres of forests since 1978 and that the rate has been steadily increasing. It also says logging outside designated areas contributes to Amazon deforestation and that selective logging weakens rainforest ecosystems.

“The latest satellite data from Brazil’s space agency, INPE, has confirmed a second consecutive year of declining deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon.” … “First, you can see that rates fell in 2023 and have fallen by another third in 2024 (shown in green bars below). That means rates have roughly halved since 2022.”

The study analyzes satellite data between 2003 and 2023 and finds that ‘between 2003 and 2023, the Amazon experienced significant deforestation, particularly in the southeastern and central regions of Brazil.’ It reports that ‘forest cover decreased from 6,048,829,834 units of forest in 2003 to 5,705,181,912 units in 2023,’ corresponding to ‘a loss of 5.86% of forest cover in that 20‑year period.’ The authors note that areas with the greatest forest loss correspond to zones of high carbon loss, and they identify shifting deforestation hotspots and areas most affected by anthropogenic forest fires, indicating changes in the spatial distribution of forest loss.

The article summarizes RAISG findings that the Amazon could lose up to 23.7 million hectares in five years under a pessimistic scenario. It also notes that land-use change, mining, road expansion, and illegal activities are intensifying pressure on the forest, but the page itself is a scenario analysis rather than direct evidence that recent observed rates accelerated.

The page compiles time‑series charts of ‘Annual deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon’ and ‘South America: change in moist forest cover, 2001–2010 (square kilometers).’ The data show large interannual variability, with peaks in the mid‑2000s, a substantial decline in Brazilian Amazon deforestation after 2004, and renewed increases in the late 2010s. The charts document temporal trends in deforestation rates but do not, by themselves, describe how the spatial patterns of forest loss across the basin have evolved.

Global Forest Watch shows that Brazil experienced a sharp drop in primary forest loss from the mid‑2000s to about 2012, followed by periods of increasing and then decreasing loss through the early 2020s. The dashboard provides annual figures and maps for recent years, revealing shifts in where tree cover loss is occurring within the country (for example, increases in parts of the eastern and southern Amazon, and more scattered loss patterns compared to earlier concentrated frontiers), but it does not explicitly state that overall Amazon‑wide deforestation rates are accelerating over the entire recent period.

Brazil’s national space research institute (INPE) publishes annual PRODES deforestation estimates for the Legal Amazon. These official time series have shown year-to-year variation, including periods of increase and decrease, and are often used to assess whether recent Amazon deforestation has accelerated or shifted spatially.