A Brazilian economist put a price tag of R$1.16 trillion, or US$216 billion at 2024 prices, on the greenhouse gas emissions Brazil avoided by clearing less forest from 2023 to 2026. It’s a big number. It’s also a modelled estimate, not a bill or a payment owed to anyone. Bráulio Borges of the Getulio Vargas Foundation’s Brazilian Institute of Economics, known as Ibre, published the figure on Monday, October 19, 2026.
What the Numbers Actually Say
The underlying data stand on their own. Brazil’s national space research institute, INPE, reported that Amazon deforestation between August 2025 and July 2026 totaled 3,335 square kilometres, down 41.8% from 5,731 square kilometres a year earlier. That’s the lowest figure in a series that began in 1988, 38 years before 2026, and it beats the previous low of 4,571 square kilometres set in 2012. INPE cautioned that the Amazon figure is an estimate based on priority images; the consolidated rate is due in the first half of 2027.
In the Cerrado, clearing fell 23.8% to 5,516.69 square kilometres from 7,235.27, the lowest since that series began in 2001. Pará lost 1,130 square kilometres of Amazon forest, Mato Grosso 849 and Amazonas 525. The four states of the Matopiba frontier accounted for 74.3% of Cerrado clearing.
How the Estimate Is Built
Borges calculated 1.49 billion tonnes of avoided carbon dioxide equivalent for 2023 to 2026, about 70% of Brazil’s gross emissions of 2.15 billion tonnes in 2024. His calculation assumes clearing would have stayed at the 2019-to-2022 average of about 19,700 square kilometres a year without the policy change from 2023. For 2025 and 2026, he modelled emissions from official data that run only through 2024.
The dollar value swings widely with the chosen carbon price. His central case applies a social cost of carbon of US$145 per tonne, the average of studies from the previous 10 years in a database kept by economist Richard Tol of the University of Sussex. The median of recent studies yields US$115 billion, or R$621 billion. A 2026 paper by Bilal and Känzig in the Quarterly Journal of Economics would yield R$9.8 trillion, about US$1.8 trillion, though Borges called that estimate controversial because it extrapolates from data for 1960 to 2019. The Environment Ministry’s lower emissions estimate of 1.1 billion tonnes, which Borges treated as a floor, comes to about US$160 billion.
FGV stressed that the opinions in the Ibre post were the author’s alone, not an institutional position.
Who Actually Gets the Benefit
For Brazil’s own economy, the headline figure shrinks fast. Using a local carbon cost of about US$8.3 per tonne, Borges estimated a domestic gain of US$12.4 billion, or R$67 billion. A national value of US$24 per tonne, drawn from a 2018 paper in Nature Climate Change, lifts that to as much as US$36 billion, or R$192 billion. He said much of that represents avoided damage, such as fewer crop losses and less heat stress on workers, which no official statistic records.
The global benefit, in other words, dwarfs what Brazil captures. Borges said it exceeds what the country receives from the Amazon Fund, carbon credit markets and the Tropical Forest Forever Facility launched at the COP30 climate summit in Belém in 2025. He called those payments “a very small fraction” of the estimated gains. He also argued that cutting deforestation is compatible with farm growth: agribusiness benefits from forest-generated rain, a regional effect his estimate leaves out and a study he cited valued at about US$20 billion a year.
The Enforcement Bill
The federal government credited satellite monitoring, inspections, land-tenure measures and farm incentives under two action plans it restored in 2023. From 2023 to 2026, the environment agency Ibama carried out 76,095 inspections, issued 25,101 fines for offenses against flora worth R$11.8 billion, or US$2.4 billion, and embargoed 18,630 square kilometres, according to INPE’s release. The sources didn’t establish how much of those fines authorities collected.
The Amazon Fund, managed by development bank BNDES, had approved 160 projects and committed R$7.8 billion, or US$1.6 billion, as of October 2026. On October 16, it announced R$147.6 million, or US$29 million, for an INPE system that uses artificial intelligence to combine yearly Prodes counts with near-real-time Deter alerts.
Why This Matters:
The decline in clearing is measurable and real. Enforcement dollars and fines helped produce it. But the US$216 billion figure rests on a counterfactual and a contested choice of carbon price, and the range runs from US$115 billion to US$1.8 trillion depending on the study. Brazil’s own measurable gain is a fraction of the headline, while payments to the country are, by Borges’s own account, very small against the claimed global benefit. That gap matters to anyone weighing how much public money and regulatory effort to commit. Whether the decline holds and whether authorities collect the fines remains unestablished.
- brazil
- deforestation
- amazon rainforest
- cerrado
- greenhouse gas emissions
- getulio vargas foundation
- inpe
- carbon pricing