Brazil Turning Over Degraded Rainforest To Scandal-Plagued "Carbon Capture" Industry In Hope Of Partial Regeneration

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The search for solutions in the Amazon couldn’t be more urgent. Rates of deforestation have been dropping since President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made combating environmental crime a priority of his government, but the destruction hasn’t stopped. Nearly 6,300 square kilometers were lost last year, according to the last official count, bringing the biome closer to what scientists warn is a tipping point, when the forest is no longer able to maintain its own rainy ecosystem and large swaths are transformed into degraded savannah. Signs of its arrival are already in abundance: dried riverbeds, forest fires, punishing droughts, increased tree mortality. Scientists have predicted the forest could experience a broad ecological collapse by 2050, when between 10 and 47 percent of the forest will “be exposed to compounding disturbances” that could “trigger unexpected ecosystem transitions,” according to a February 2024 study in Nature.

But other research has also provided cause for hope. Despite the delicate nature of the Amazon’s ecosystem, the forest has also shown a robust capacity for regrowth. A recent study showed that roughly 72,000 square kilometers of the biome lost to deforestation are already in an advanced stage of natural regeneration. Much of the regenerated forest is in areas not threatened by agricultural production, a principal driver of deforestation, additional research found this year.

“The forest can come back,” said Andreia Pinto an environmental researcher who has written several of the studies. “The scar of deforestation can be healed.” Whether the wound reopens again is another question. Roughly 60 percent of regenerated forest is later deforested, according to a study last year by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research.

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For state officials, the first step was reclaiming the land. In 2022, authorities arrested a notorious cattleman whom they accused of being one of the Amazon’s most prolific deforesters. They cleared out his farm and renamed the 100 square-kilometer plot a “unit of restoration” — a new jurisdictional definition. Then in March, hoping to create a new local economy based on environmentalism, the state put the parcel on the auction block for a carbon credit company to restore. The plan is not without risk. Brazil’s carbon credit industry, which seeks to protect the forest in exchange for credits that can be sold on international markets, has been beset by scandal. Past projects have been accused of exaggerating environmental impact, improperly using government lands and creating divisions within Indigenous communities.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2025/08/03/brazil-amazon-deforestation-carbon-credits/