Brazil’s environmental agenda is tasting bittersweet in 2025. While the country’s northern capital city of Belém is wrapped in global expectations for hosting the COP30 U.N. climate summit in November, loud alarms have sounded in the Amazon due to a noticeable growth in deforestation in the first months of the year. In May, deforestation reached 960 square kilometres (around 370 square miles), a 92% increase compared with the same month in 2024, according to data from the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change. The numbers are part of a broader problem: Brazil’s space agency, INPE, had already indicated in April that alerts of forest loss had risen by 55% in 2025, suggesting that a big-scale upward trend could be in progress. A mid-year review published in July corroborated the forecast. From January to June, deforestation alerts covered 2,090 square kilometers (806 square miles), 27% more than in the same period last year, the highest since 2023, according to INPE. Authorities are now trying to piece together the puzzle, especially as recent reports bring an unprecedented aspect. When unraveling the data in early June, João Paulo Capobianco, executive secretary for the environment ministry, stated that more than half (51%) of the recently detected deforestation was recorded in portions of the forest that were recently burned. To make matters worse, this issue is gaining steam: from an average of 6.6% between 2016 and 2022, it jumped to 21% in May 2024, until reaching the recently registered record-breaking levels. In a statement,…This article was originally published on Mongabay