Brazil Forest Gains Valued at $216 Billion

Brazil avoided an estimated 1.49 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions through lower deforestation from 2023 to 2026, economist Bráulio Borges calculated. He valued that reduction at R$1.16 trillion, or US$216 billion at 2024 prices. The estimate assigns a global economic value to changes in land clearing within Brazil; it isn’t money owed to the country.

The Value of Forest Protection

Borges, of the Getulio Vargas Foundation’s Brazilian Institute of Economics, published the estimate on Monday, October 19, 2026. His central case uses a social cost of carbon of US$145 per tonne, the average from studies published over the previous 10 years in a database maintained by economist Richard Tol of the University of Sussex.

The estimated emissions avoided equal about 70% of Brazil’s gross emissions of 2.15 billion tonnes in 2024. The Environment Ministry’s lower estimate came to 1.1 billion tonnes. Borges treated that number as a floor and valued it at about US$160 billion using the same carbon price.

The result shifts with the carbon price. The median of recent studies yields a value of US$115 billion, or R$621 billion. A 2026 paper by Bilal and Känzig in the Quarterly Journal of Economics would put the figure at R$9.8 trillion, about US$1.8 trillion. Borges called that estimate controversial because it extrapolates from data for 1960 to 2019.

For Brazil’s domestic economy, Borges estimated a gain of US$12.4 billion, or R$67 billion, using a local carbon cost of about US$8.3 per tonne. A national value of US$24 per tonne, from a 2018 paper in Nature Climate Change, raises the estimate to as much as US$36 billion, or R$192 billion. Many benefits involve damage avoided, he said, including fewer crop losses and less heat stress on workers—effects no official statistic records.

Clearing Falls Across Two Biomes

INPE reported 3,335 square kilometres of Amazon deforestation from August 2025 to July 2026, a 41.8% drop from 5,731 square kilometres a year earlier. It’s the lowest figure in the series, which began in 1988, and below the previous low of 4,571 square kilometres in 2012. INPE said the Amazon figure is an estimate based on priority images; the agency expects to release the consolidated rate in the first half of 2027.

Cerrado clearing dropped 23.8%, to 5,516.69 square kilometres from 7,235.27, the lowest figure since that series began in 2001. Pará lost 1,130 square kilometres of Amazon forest, Mato Grosso 849 and Amazonas 525. The four states in the Matopiba frontier accounted for 74.3% of Cerrado clearing. Maranhão lost 1,718.59 square kilometres and Tocantins 1,263.06.

Borges said Amazon clearing stood 71% below the 11,594 square kilometres recorded in 2022. Combined clearing in the Amazon and Cerrado fell from 22,300 square kilometres in 2022 to 8,900 in 2026, a drop of about 60%. Compared with the 2019-to-2022 average of about 19,700 square kilometres a year, lower clearing from 2023 to 2026 left about 22,300 square kilometres uncleared—slightly more land than Sergipe.

Government Measures and Funding

The federal government credited satellite monitoring, inspections, land-tenure measures and farm incentives under two action plans restored in 2023 for the decline. From 2023 to 2026, 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 the fines had been collected.

The Amazon Fund, which development bank BNDES manages, had approved 160 projects and committed R$7.8 billion, or US$1.6 billion, in October 2026. On October 16, the fund 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.

Borges said the global benefit exceeds what Brazil 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. The US$216 billion calculation assumes clearing would have stayed at the 2019-to-2022 average without the policy change from 2023; emissions for 2025 and 2026 are modelled using official data through 2024. FGV said opinions in the Ibre post were Borges’s alone, not an institutional position. The sources didn’t establish whether the decline would continue.