Brazilians participated in a presidential election earlier this month that observers characterized as a pivotal moment for the Amazon rainforest. The contest pitted three-term incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva against Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro. In first-round voting, Bolsonaro secured 2.2 million more votes than Lula, but neither candidate reached the 50 percent threshold required for an outright victory. A runoff election is scheduled for October 25.
Environmental scientists have expressed serious concerns about a Bolsonaro victory. According to Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist at the University of São Paulo’s Institute for Advanced Studies, Bolsonaro’s status as a climate denier poses substantial risks to the Amazon. Bolsonaro is campaigning on an agribusiness-friendly platform centered on regulatory streamlining, while Lula has committed to achieving net-zero deforestation by 2030. Bolsonaro’s promise targets zero illegal deforestation by 2029, with the distinction being that legal clearing would remain permissible under his proposed policies. Monica de Bolle, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, compared a potential Bolsonaro presidency to his father’s term, which witnessed increased forest clearing, diminished environmental enforcement, and nearly doubled carbon emissions in the Amazon during 2019 and 2020 compared to 2010 to 2018 averages.
The Amazon rainforest contains approximately 175 billion metric tons of carbon and generates much of its own rainfall through water transpired by its trees. Scientists have identified a deforestation tipping point that, once crossed, could trigger a cascade of feedback loops converting the rainforest into savanna and degraded forest. The most frequently cited threshold is 20 to 25 percent total clearing, though a May Nature study suggested the range extends to 22 to 28 percent when accounting for projected global warming. Currently, approximately 18 percent of the total Amazon and 22 percent of the Brazilian Amazon have been cleared. If Bolsonaro pursued his father’s deforestation pace, the rainforest would lose roughly 17,600 square miles over four years, compared to approximately 8,890 square miles at current rates.
First-round results indicated agricultural interests influenced voting patterns. Lula’s vote share declined in nearly every municipality compared to his 2022 performance, but the decline was particularly steep in agricultural regions, where his support fell by nearly 8 percentage points versus roughly 3 points in non-agricultural areas. The Parliamentary Agricultural Front, Brazil’s principal agribusiness lobby, has endorsed Flávio Bolsonaro ahead of the runoff. Under Lula’s current administration, Amazon clearing rates have declined annually, whereas a return to previous deforestation rates could push the forest toward the critical tipping point by the middle or end of the 2030s, according to climate scientist Nico Wunderling from Goethe University Frankfurt.
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