The dry season returned to Brazil’s Amazon region in late July—and with it, forest fires, largely human-made. After making substantial progress in reducing deforestation in the 2000s and early 2010s, Brazil has reversed course and deforestation is rising. In the Amazon, this season has been the worst in more than a decade in number of fires, and second worst in terms of total deforestation, according to satellite data from Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research (INPE), which monitors the situation.

The problem has been even worse outside the Amazon region. This season, fires rose a staggering 220 percent in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands, compared with the same period in 2019. Fires destroyed almost all of the vegetation in the world’s largest hyacinth macaw refuge in the Pantanal. Today, 85 percent of Brazil’s coastal Atlantic Forest—home to 223 endemic bird species and more than 4,000 species of trees—has disappeared. The soy and cattle industries also endanger many of the 11,000 native plant species of the Cerrado biome.

Forest fires are usually neither natural nor accidental in Brazil. Since the Portuguese first arrived on the land they named for the brazilwood tree, chopping and burning trees has been central to Brazil’s model of development. Ranchers, the soy industry, small farmers, and wildcat gold miners take advantage of the dry season to slash and burn, chopping down vegetation and then burning it when conditions become dry enough—much of the time illegally.

This time last year, international outcry over Brazil’s 2019 fires succeeded in prodding the administration of right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro to clamp down on illegal land clearing. But the increased vigilance was temporary. In the first half of 2020, environmental fines dropped 60 percent, while satellite monitoring systems registered an alarming uptick in deforestation.

Scientists warn that the world’s largest rainforest could soon reach a tipping point, transitioning into a savanna as trees die, and fires and droughts intensify in a death spiral. Converting the entire Amazon to pasture would add an estimated 0.25 degrees Celsius to global temperature rise.

Increasingly, economists and environmentalists agree on the need to take action. Last month, former Brazilian finance ministers and Central Bank presidents issued an open letter calling for a “green” economic recovery from COVID-19.

Our new report shows that cycles of inferno and conflagration could be averted. Over the course of a year, we listened to the perspectives of policymakers, environmental and social scientists, civil society, the business community, and ordinary Brazilians.

Together, their views present an emerging consensus for how to slow deforestation and rebuild Brazil’s forest stocks. Our interviewees endorsed moving on three fronts.

First, we must keep pushing for more ambitious policies. The fact that Brazil established fixed emissions commitments at the Paris Accords was an environmentalist victory, but a recent UN report estimates they aren’t enough to keep global warming below the 2 degree Celsius maximum target.

In the medium term, however, President Bolsonaro—who campaigned on the (unfulfilled) promise to abandon the Paris Accords and once suggested people defecate every other day to protect the environment—may block most legislative efforts.  

That brings us to the second front: Laws and international commitments depend on fair and consistent environmental enforcement. At present, logging on public lands and laundering cattle—that is, selling cattle raised on illegally deforested land from one ranch or slaughterhouse to a more reputable one to obscure its origin—is a lucrative business.

Local NGOs, indigenous communities, and business leaders can all publicly support enforcement. International pressure also helps, as we saw following forest fires last August. Domestic and international pressure are again ramping up. However, monitoring a region roughly the size of the 48 contiguous United States requires sustained attention and resources. 

But what if we rethink economies so that people don’t even want to deforest? Many of our interviewees reimagined individual incentives for sustainability. This third front involves developing a new vision for economic development in Brazil’s threatened regions. Here, international investors are critical.

Most famously, European donors are paying Amazon residents to preserve the forest via the REDD+ carbon pricing scheme. However, as Cambridge University geographer Christopher Schulz explained, funding stewardship in one corner of a forest may just encourage farmers, loggers, and miners to shift elsewhere.

The world needs would-be farmers, miners, and loggers involved instead in low-carbon economic development. Romantic images of an untouched, unpopulated Amazon are just that. Long before Europeans arrived, indigenous peoples were shaping the ecology of the forest to feed and house their families. The fact is, the Amazon is home to 30 million people who will find a way to earn a living.

Today, the Amazon Creative Labs are creating new and lucrative value chains from forest crops such as the brazil nut and the açai berry.  The goal, says prominent climate scientist Carlos Nobre, is to build a “bio-economy” that “leaves the forest standing. 

A standing forest economy will require skilled labor. We should be spending 100 times more to train the next generation of entrepreneurs, said Denis Minev, a business leader and founder of the Sustainable Amazon Foundation, to change the Amazon.

Even agriculture and energy, traditionally carbon-intensive industries, hold promise. R&D and capital investments in sustainable agriculture and ranching are increasing. And Brazil’s wind and solar industries have begun to show a “green spiral,” where environmental and industry dynamics become mutually reinforcing, according to Kathryn Hochstetler of the London School of Economics.

Brazilians are keenly aware that their local environments are changing, threatening the globe. However, seeing the pattern is easier than changing the economic systems generating it.

Increasingly, climate scientists and economists agree that the longstanding narrative that pits economic development against environmental protection must be jettisoned. Deforestation once built Brazil’s economy, but standing forests may be the key to its future.