2026-10-04 · hectares of primary forest loss (recent year)
Amazon loss is concentrated in a few states
Brazilian deforestation dominates headlines — hectares tell the story.
Headlines follow Brazilian deforestation; hectares decide where it happens. Of roughly 500,000 hectares of primary forest lost in the most recent year, 78% fell inside the Legal Amazon states — concentrating enforcement, finance and restoration there would touch most of the national total. The other 22% scatters across remaining biomes, where loss is easier to overlook.
1 cell = 500 hectares of primary forest loss (recent year) (0.1% of Brazilian Amazon loss) · 1,000 cells
Context
MapBiomas — a multi-institutional network of universities, NGOs and technology companies — maps land cover and use every year from Landsat imagery at 30-meter resolution, running AI classifiers on Google Earth Engine. Its Brazil series stretches back to 1985, and Collection 10.1, released in February 2026, extends the record through 2024.
The 22% of loss outside the Legal Amazon states is not a rounding error: MapBiomas reported in September 2026 that secondary vegetation loss in the Cerrado, Brazil's second-largest biome, has risen roughly 20% since 2017. The network also found that burned area across Brazil fell 31% in 2025, a separate signal that land-cover pressures shift quickly.
Shares here are illustrative, per MapBiomas/INPE deforestation data. The grid's point is distribution rather than precision: where primary forest loss clusters determines which policies, budgets and enforcement operations move the national number.
MapBiomas / INPE deforestation shares, illustrative.
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Credit this grid as Inagrid — https://inagrid.com/e/2026-10-04-deforestation-brazil
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