In recent weeks, Brazil’s Amazon rainforest—the largest such biome in the world and sometimes sensationally called the “lungs of the planet”—has transformed into a mass source of smoke and carbon dioxide emissions due to fires. The smoke from there and other Brazilian regions has spread to cities, with the skies of São Paulo turning red and plumes visible from space. The forested area that burned in August 2024 was 132 percent larger than the area that was on fire the same month a year before.
It’s extremely rare for the Amazon to naturally catch fire. Intervals between natural fires have historically lasted hundreds or thousands of years. The contemporary fires indeed have a human-made cause—one that has become increasingly ubiquitous in the Amazon. These largely deforestation-induced fires are being driven predominantly by land theft.
Although the total area of the Amazon affected by deforestation has declined since 2022, the forest is far from safe. In 2021, during the administration of then-Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, deforestation hit a 15-year high and reached 13,000 square kilometers (about 5,020 square miles)—an area bigger than Lebanon or Jamaica. The existing web of dry, deforested patches, informal roads, and unregistered settlements around towns and cities creates vulnerable human-made “ignition points” for fires. A deforested area full of dry logs and dead branches catches fire more easily than a forested area with more humidity and precipitation.
Climate change has made these dry patches even more dangerous for the health of the rainforest. A warmer planet has led to higher temperatures and more frequent droughts, both of which increase the risk of fires.
The land rush that produced this deforestation and paved the way for many of these fires is linked to organized crime networks that are allied to powerful political and business elites. Criminal groups understand that deforested land is more economically valuable—at least in the short term—than pristine forest.
Those responsible use heavy equipment to bring down heavily forested areas, including in public land, natural reserves, and protected Indigenous territories, and register them through an initial step of land regularization called the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR in Portuguese). Despite not having a full land title, many self-declared “owners” then sell this land to cattle ranchers, small farmers, and sometimes informal miners—industries that require deforestation to make way for economic activity.
Land for cattle ranching, logging, agriculture, gold panning, and housing means big money—and it has attracted the interest of big criminal players. Political elites, including several mayors, have been accused of using their local power over law enforcement to facilitate logging and cattle ranching on protected lands.
Control over local government also gives some mayors the power to create new gold panning areas along the rivers in the amazonian state of Pará, but this power has often been abused, leading to deforestation and river contamination by mercury in protected Indigenous lands. In the 2020 municipal elections, during the height of Bolsonaro’s laissez-faire approach to environmental protection, 118 candidates for mayor and deputy mayor in the Amazon region had been fined for some sort of environmental infraction.
The big profits and powerful criminal groups involved have turned land theft into a bloody business. Conflicts over land led to more than 300 killings in the Brazilian Amazon between 2012 and 2020, according to Pastoral da Terra, a nongovernmental organization.
A number of urban areas in the Amazon have become launching pads of deforestation, gradually eating up forest space to make way for cattle ranching. Towns whose environs registered the most cases of fire in recent months are also historically associated with land theft, deforestation, and illegal mining. But fires have also spread further and further into the rainforest, and indigenous territories are now registering a large share of the fires.
Road infrastructure expansion throughout the Amazon, while beneficial to residents and soybean exporters from farms to the south, facilitates this type of unregistered land occupation. Many of the fire hot spots in both the current and past crises are located at the margins of Brazil’s large highways and urban areas. Local activists are campaigning to halt a new highway project, BR-319, saying that 5,000 kilometers (about 3,100 miles) of “unofficial” side roads have already been built around the existing highway to facilitate economic activity that contributes to deforestation, including logging and cattle ranching.
Another driver of land seizure and deforestation are smaller-scale farmers and cattle ranchers, such as the estimated 1,000 people who occupied what was once referred to within Brazil as the “largest illegal community” on protected Indigenous land. The illegally built village—named Vila Renascer, or “Rebirth Village”—illustrates the destructive relationship that is prevailing between human settlements and the rainforest. Its land was cleared by powerful politicians and land speculators inside the protected Apyterewa indigenous territory in 2016, paving the way for small farmers who settled there.
By the time that its inhabitants were forcefully removed by the government in 2023, the farms that surrounded the village contained 60,000 heads of cattle, and the community had been described by an environmental agent as the “principal support center of land-grabbing and deforestation” in the area. And despite the village being vacated, the problem persists: Plots of land inside the forest are openly sold on social media websites without official registration.
Settlements such as Vila Renascer, cities, and the growing road network serve as vital bases and transportation routes for the machinery, and their residents provide the political support necessary for deforestation. The large-scale criminal activity, in turn, often leads to land being divided up in smaller plots—which face less scrutiny from authorities—and sold to small farmers, forming a lineage of economic activity stemming from the initial land grabbing.
Land seizures, deforestation, and fires are inextricably linked in this chain of illicit activities. Therefore, both law enforcement and socioeconomic changes need to be stepped up and adapted to combat organized criminal actors and reorient impoverished small farmers trying to make a living.
Large-scale land grabbers, including local politicians, are often fined by environmental protection agencies but rarely pay the penalties. Greater law enforcement presence is also needed on a more regular basis along the roads and urban areas connected to deforestation patches. Brazil’s agencies leading the fight against environmental crime are highly capable, but they need greater political support to face up to influential political and business elites, including some elected officials. Political patronage of—or direct involvement in—land and environmental crime protects perpetrators thanks to meddling in local and state agencies as well as the sheer fear that it inspires in the general population, which is reinforced by assassinations.
This entanglement of political power and criminal interests is difficult to resolve, but one first step is to continue to rebuild the institutional infrastructure around environmental regulation and law enforcement that was weakened during the Bolsonaro administration. This involves expanding and providing more security to federal environmental agencies, which are much less vulnerable to the corrupting influence of local criminal groups.
Another important step to fight organized crime in the Amazon is data. International partners and the Brazilian government should encourage greater expert analysis on the functioning of organized crime, including the linkage between land grabbing and the global illicit flows of timber, wildlife, minerals, and money laundering. Whereas foreign governments such as those of Norway, the United States, and Japan support the Amazon Fund against deforestation, research on criminal networks is highly risky and needs a lot more support.
Small-scale land seizures—sometimes orchestrated by high-level criminals—can potentially be limited and hopefully halted through encouragement toward locals pursue to sustainable economic alternatives, such as the commercial farming of plants and seeds, including for biofuel, and even sustainably managed timber extraction.
Land is one of the world’s most valuable resources. The rush for it in the Amazon is now riskier than ever due to the effects of climate change, with a warming planet facilitating increased vegetation fires in deforested areas.
These risks are not just local or regional, but global. The Amazon plays a role in regulating regional temperatures and storing carbon, therefore contributing to global emissions reduction goals. Both international donors and the countries sharing the Amazon need to better understand and tackle land crimes and high-level corruption to reverse this dangerous trend.