Brazil's Forest Rescue Is Worth $216 Billion, Study Finds

Brazil kept about 1.49 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions out of the atmosphere between 2023 and 2026 by cutting deforestation. A new estimate from the Getulio Vargas Foundation values that restraint at R$1.16 trillion, or US$216 billion at 2024 prices. Bráulio Borges, an economist at FGV's Brazilian Institute of Economics, known as Ibre, published the figure on Monday, October 19, 2026.

The numbers behind it are striking. Brazil's national space research institute, INPE, reported that Amazon deforestation from August 2025 to July 2026 totaled 3,335 square kilometres, down 41.8% from 5,731 square kilometres a year earlier. It’s the lowest figure in a series that began in 1988, and it sits below the previous low of 4,571 square kilometres, set in 2012. INPE cautioned that the Amazon number is an estimate based on priority images; the consolidated rate is due in the first half of 2027.

What the Forest Gave Back

The Cerrado improved too. Clearing there 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. Maranhão lost 1,718.59 square kilometres and Tocantins 1,263.06.

Borges said Amazon clearing is now 71% below the 11,594 square kilometres recorded in 2022. Combined clearing in the two biomes dropped from 22,300 square kilometres in 2022 to 8,900 in 2026, a decline of about 60%. Compared with the 2019-to-2022 average of about 19,700 square kilometres a year, roughly 22,300 square kilometres went uncleared—an area slightly larger than Sergipe.

The avoided emissions equal about 70% of Brazil's gross emissions of 2.15 billion tonnes in 2024. The Environment Ministry's lower estimate was 1.1 billion tonnes. Borges treated that figure as a floor worth about US$160 billion at the same 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.

Who Benefits, and Who Pays

The value shifts with the carbon price. 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 produce R$9.8 trillion, about US$1.8 trillion. Borges called that estimate controversial because it extrapolates from data for 1960 to 2019.

Brazilians gain directly. Borges estimated a domestic benefit of US$12.4 billion, or R$67 billion, using a local carbon cost of about US$8.3 per tonne, and up to US$36 billion, or R$192 billion, using a national value of US$24 per tonne from a 2018 paper in Nature Climate Change. Much of that value comes from avoided damage, he said, including fewer crop losses and less heat stress on workers—harms no official statistic records. His estimate leaves out the forest's effect on regional rainfall, which a study he cited valued at about US$20 billion a year, or about US$60 per hectare of Amazon forest.

Borges argued that protecting forest and growing farms aren't at odds, since agribusiness benefits from forest-generated rain.

Here’s the catch. Borges said the global benefit far 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.

Enforcement Did the Work

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 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 using artificial intelligence to combine yearly Prodes counts with near-real-time Deter alerts.

There are limits. The US$216 billion is a modelled estimate, not a bill or payment due to Brazil. It assumes clearing would have stayed at the 2019-to-2022 average without the policy change. Emissions for 2025 and 2026 are modelled from official data through 2024. FGV said the opinions in the Ibre post were the author's alone, and the sources didn’t establish whether the decline will continue or how much of the reported fines has been collected.

Why This Matters: The study puts a price on what public enforcement achieved: fewer fires, less lost forest, and avoided harm to farmers and outdoor workers whose losses never show up in official statistics. It also exposes a gap. Borges says the world gains far more from Brazil's restraint than Brazil is paid for it, raising a question about who should finance forest protection when its benefits are global. The fines issued total R$11.8 billion, yet the sources don't say how much has been collected, so accountability remains unfinished. And because INPE's Amazon figure is still an estimate, with the consolidated rate due in 2027, the durability of this progress depends on whether the monitoring, inspections and funding behind it hold.