Amazônia 2030

Tag: region

  • State of the Brazilian Amazon

    State of the Brazilian Amazon


    Download here

    The State of the Brazilian Amazon is an unprecedented compilation that brings together some of the main findings of the Amazônia 2030 Project, organized specifically to mark the UN Climate Conference taking place in Belém do Pará. More than just a statistical snapshot, this edition aims to serve as a guide for those seeking to understand the heterogeneity and richness of the Amazon, gathering essential data on the region’s territory, population, environment, and economy at a decisive moment for the planet’s future.

    The 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) will bring together leaders from nearly 200 countries, as well as scientists and civil society representatives, to discuss commitments and actions to tackle the climate crisis. For the first time, the event will be held in the heart of the Amazon, underscoring the biome’s central role in the planet’s future.

    Key Highlights

    Territory and Population: The Legal Amazon covers 59% of Brazil, with 5 million km² and 26.7 million inhabitants (13% of the national population) distributed across 773 municipalities.

    Five Amazons: The report classifies the region into five distinct zones — forest (39% of the area), under pressure (29%), deforested (11%), non-forest/Cerrado (21%), and urban (76% of the population).

    Deforestation: Although declining since 2021, it remains critical. The total deforested area reached 857,000 km² by 2024, equivalent to 20.6% of the original forest cover. States such as Maranhão (65.9%), Mato Grosso (35.3%), and Pará (26.4%) have lost significant portions of their vegetation.

    Fires: In 2024, the region recorded 192,700 fire hotspots, the highest number since 2014 — a 52% increase compared to 2023, driven mainly by Mato Grosso (+133%) and Roraima (+102%).

    Emissions: The Legal Amazon accounted for 1.1 billion tons of CO₂ in 2023, nearly half of Brazil’s emissions. Net emissions were 602 million tons, representing 36% of the country’s net total.

    Bioeconomy: The 10 main products of the region generated billions in 2023. Açaí led with R$ 8.9 billion, followed by canephora coffee (R$ 2.5 billion), banana (R$ 2.4 billion), cocoa (R$ 2.1 billion), and Brazil nuts (R$ 172 million).

    Poverty: In 2024, around 10 million people were living in poverty in the region, equivalent to 36% of the Legal Amazon’s population — above the national average.

    Violence: The homicide rate remains high, reaching 32.9 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023, still above the national average.

    The study shows that the Amazon is not a single reality but multiple Amazons combining different levels of conservation, land use, and social conditions. Recognizing this diversity is essential for formulating policies that reconcile environmental conservation, social inclusion, and economic prosperity.

    The COP30 Edition of Fatos da Amazônia was supported by Fundo Vale, Instituto Itaúsa, the Institute for Climate and Society (iCS), and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

    Read the full paper here.

  • Accessibility in The Legal Amazon: Digital Solutions

    Accessibility in The Legal Amazon: Digital Solutions


    Download here

    The Legal Amazon is the most isolated region in Brazil. Reducing this isolation and improving the economic ties between the Legal Amazon and other parts of the world is key to boosting the region’s economy and creating jobs and income for the local population. Traditionally, investment in logistics infrastructure, and particularly in roads, was the primary initiative for improving the accessibility of isolated areas. However, technological progress and changes in workplace organization (for example, working remotely, outsourcing services such as call centers, etc.) have made investing in phone and high-speed internet services an important part of improving the accessibility of areas such as the Amazon.

    Expanding access to phone and high-speed internet services is strategic for the Amazon for two reasons. First, phone and internet services allow for a significant increase in accessibility without the socio-environmental risks associated with investing in traditional logistics in the region.1 Secondly, broadband infrastructure has the potential to increase income and job opportunities for local workers and entrepreneurs. This is especially significant given the region’s weak economy and rising unemployment.2

    This document discusses how expanding access to phone and high-speed internet services has the potential to boost the economy in the Legal Amazon. This brief summarizes the available evidence on the impact of information and communication technologies on businesses and workers with an emphasis on the effects observed in both the rural and urban sectors. Next, it discusses how access to this technology in the region, as well as improvements to this access, can boost the economy of the Legal Amazon.

    Read the full paper here.

  • Accessibility in The Legal Amazon: Measuring Market Access

    Accessibility in The Legal Amazon: Measuring Market Access


    Download here

    An excellent transportation infrastructure is essential for promoting regional development. Areas served by efficient networks of waterways, railways and roads are well-equipped to do business with other regions. This ends up increasing local competitiveness and influencing businesses and individuals to establish themselves in the region. The increase in the number of businesses and workers, in turn, leads to economies of scale, further strengthening the region’s competitiveness and attracting even more businesses and workers.1,2,3,4,5,6,7

    Improving accessibility is a key strategic component in remote and sparsely populated areas such as the Legal Amazon. To improve a region’s accessibility, one challenge is to identify – among the various existing logistical infrastructure investment possibilities – the best investment opportunities to increase the region’s accessibility. This requires appropriate accessibility metrics that summarize how different investments influence a region’s accessibility.

    Building these metrics, however, is conceptually complex, since any region has numerous relevant transportation costs, and each one of them influences regional economies in different ways. For example, the set of transportation costs relevant to the competitiveness of a producer who imports materials from outside the region and produces for the local market will be completely different from the transportation costs relevant to a producer who imports materials from one location and exports its product to another part of the country.

    This report presents groundbreaking estimates of the accessibility of the municipalities in the Legal Amazon. It first discusses how it is possible to summarize the effects of the transportation cost structure on a regional economy in a single metric called market access. It then presents the data and procedures used to construct the market access metric for Brazilian municipalities. Next, it discusses how the accessibility of the municipalities in the Legal Amazon compares to the accessibility of the municipalities in other parts of the country. Finally, it breaks down the accessibility metrics into different components to show that the poor quality of the transportation network is the key factor in the greater isolation of the municipalities in the Legal Amazon compared to the other municipalities in Brazil.

    Read the full paper here.

  • Vocational Education in The Legal Amazon

    Vocational Education in The Legal Amazon


    Download here

    Vocational Education in the Legal Amazon is suboptimal. Faced with a particularly challenging job market for young people, the low representativity of technical  raining in the region’s workforce has made it even more difficult for workers to enter the workforce. This study, produced by researchers from the Amazon 2030 project (AMZ 2030), reveals how the low rate of schooling in this modality contributes to a lower qualification of the workforce, which can mean a wasted opportunity of using the demographic bonus that the region has been experiencing. The report “Education in the Legal Amazon – Assessment and Critical Factors”, developed by education economists Tássia Cruz and Juliana Portella, analyzes the main characteristics and challenges of elementary and higher education in the region. In its section on Vocational Education, the document dialogues with other AMZ 2030 publications which examine the way the region’s labor market operates and point out lessons for development and for the generation of local jobs based on the experiences of free trade zones and international business.

    To assess the situation in Vocational Education in the Legal Amazon and compare it with other Brazilian states, the researchers analyzed data from the Basic Education Census of the Anísio Teixeira National Institute of Educational Studies and Research (INEP), Ministry of Education and National Research by Continuous Household Sampling (PNAD Contínua), and the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). The numbers refer to an economic scenario that includes the year 2020 and, therefore, the beginning of the crisis triggered by the new coronavirus, although this has not significantly changed the indicators considered. 1 Gonzaga, Gustavo, Flávia Alfenas e Francisco Cavalcanti. Mercado de Trabalho na Amazônia Legal – Uma análise comparativa com o resto do Brasil.

    The data reveal that there is a low rate of schooling in Vocational Education in all the states that make up the Legal Amazon, especially when compared to the average for the rest of the country. Figure 1 shows the gross enrollment rate at this stage, equivalent to the ratio between the number of enrollments (regardless of age group) in Vocational Education and the total population in the age group expected for this stage (in this case, between 15 and 29 years of age). This rate for the Legal Amazon as a whole is almost half that of the rest of Brazil, indicating that the chance of a young person from the Legal Amazon to be enrolled in Vocational Education is much lower than that of a young person from outside the region.

    Read the full paper here.

  • Increasing Cattle Productivity in The Amazon Requires New Technologies

    Increasing Cattle Productivity in The Amazon Requires New Technologies


    Download here

    Cattle ranching is associated with deforestation in the Amazon region – a large part of the deforested areas have been converted to pasture. This pattern of extensive cattle ranching in the Amazon region is distinguished from the rest of Brazil. While the rest of Brazil uses less pasture over time for livestock production, the opposite is happening in the Amazon region, with an expansion of the pasture area (Figure 1). However, the role of livestock as a cause of deforestation is less evident. On the one hand, the expansion of the activity in the region can
    lead to deforestation. On the other hand, land grabbing has used livestock as part of the process of occupation of the territory. In this case, livestock would be more a consequence of and grabbing and deforestation than a cause.

    In this context, reducing the conversion of forests into pastureland while protecting or increasing rancher’s livelihoods is one of the main challenges for promoting sustainable development in the Legal Amazon. A key component to achieving this goal is increasing pasture productivity

    This brief summarizes the findings from Climate Policy Initiative/Pontifical Catholic University (CPI/PUC-Rio) that calculates the potential for increasing pasture productivity in the Legal Amazon by disseminating technologies that are widely used in just some parts of the region to all parts of the region.

    Agronomic models estimate that it is possible to nearly triple Brazil’s pasture productivity through a combination of better management and ranching intensification. From the point of view of public policies, it is important to understand the origin of the productivity gains identified in the agronomic models. Are these gains mainly found in the dissemination of practices already widely used in some high-productivity municipalities? Or do they require the introduction of production models that use practices not widely used in the Legal Amazon? This
    distinction has important implications for both the design of agricultural policies and, for example, for training policies and the dissemination of new technologies.

    CPI/PUC-Rio researchers show that livestock productivity is quite homogeneous in the region, with a predominance of land extensive production, little use of inputs (based on data from the 2017 Agricultural Census, just 12% of the properties used machines and only 3% used liming to correct the soil for pasture), and overall low levels of productivity. This uniformity translates into small benefits from disseminating the practices already used in the most productive municipalities in the Legal Amazon to the other municipalities in the region. Researchers
    calculate that this kind of dissemination could increase the value of its livestock production without increasing deforestation in the Legal Amazon by 17.6-29.4%

    Although the estimated productivity gain is relevant, it is substantially less than the potential identified in the agronomic literature. It is also considerably less than the potential for productivity gains in Brazilian agriculture, as calculated in previous work by CPI/PUC-Rio.6 This indicates that the achievement of major productivity gains for cattle ranching in the Legal Amazon will require the introduction of a new business model with the dissemination of techniques and technologies not yet used in scale in the region and also the fight against activities such as land grabbing that has used extensive and not very productive livestock farming as part of its
    processes.