Last week, more than 260 researchers convened in Milan to discuss the opportunities, challenges and risks involved in scaling “carbon dioxide removal” (CDR) to help curb climate change.
The conference – held on the campus of the Politecnico di Milano – is the fourth in a series, with previous editions held in Oxford, UK in 2024, and Gothenburg, Sweden in 2018 and 2022.
A broad range of academics – from forests, oceans and soils experts through to social and political scientists – discussed the co-benefits and trade-offs involved in drawing down CO2 from the atmosphere at scale, as well as the ways policy could drive CDR deployment.
Dr Soheil Shayegh, director of the industrial and planetary carbon cycle programme at the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC), told Carbon Brief the idea behind the conference was to “bring scientists together to convey a message to policymakers about where the technology stands”.
He continued: “We should be very clear that there still are huge uncertainties about the effectiveness of lots of this CDR technology – are they marketable or not? But what is clear for us is the need for CDR.”
Dr Morgan Edwards, the lead author of the recently published “state of CDR report”, told delegates that meeting the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C goal by the end of this century would require CDR to “scale up rapidly” from 2.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2 per year) today to 8.8GtCO2 by 2050.
She added: “We need to see an upscaling in ambition over the next few years to get on a track consistent with these long-term scenarios.”
Below, Carbon Brief summarises the key talking points at the conference.
Overshoot
The removal of carbon from the atmosphere is seen as crucial to compensate for the emissions from human activities that are difficult to decarbonise – for instance, those generated in aviation and agriculture.
This, scientists have emphasised, must come in addition to steep emissions cuts.
CDR has another role, which is as a mechanism to return average global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, in the likely event that the Paris Agreement’s temperature target is exceeded.
The Milan conference comes after 2024 was the first single year to breach the 1.5C target and as scientists have projected that the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C target – typically interpreted in terms of a 20-year average – could be exceeded by the end of this decade.
Prof Sabine Fuss, head of research department at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) told Carbon Brief the likely breach of the 1.5C limit means the CDR research agenda was getting “even bigger” as the world would need to contend with “even larger scales” of CDR. She added:
“Some of the things that we were worrying about already in a net-zero context are getting even more pertinent. Also, [we need to think about] what will happen under climate change. A lot of [CDR approaches] may not be super resilient if we’re facing higher temperatures and more disturbances. Think about forests.”
Prof Massimo Tavoni, scientific director of the RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment, described the prospect of returning temperatures to 1.5C with CDR as the “biggest Earth restoration project ever”.
Speaking in the plenary, Tavoni said the concepts of “overshoot” and “CDR” were “closely connected, but not the same thing”.
Broadly speaking, there have been three “phases” of overshoot research, Tavoni said:
- 1995 to 2005: a period where overshoot was not “seriously considered”, he argued. It was during this period that researchers first explored scenarios that would “now be classified as overshoot pathways” and “set out CO2 removal as a mechanism” for stabilising the climate, he said.
- 2005 to 2015: the age when “overshoot was discovered”, according to Tavoni. At this time, he said, “[climate] ambition was rising and emissions were also rising, which led to the incorporation of CDR in the models”.
- 2015 to the present day: an “age of reckoning” where overshoot has become “formally entangled” in the scenarios created by the climate community due to the “absolute need for overshoot and CDR to achieve [temperature] targets in the face of growing CO2 concentration”.
Tavoni noted that all of the new emissions scenarios set out ahead of the seventh phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP7) – unveiled in April – exceeded the 1.5C limit.
(CMIP is a global initiative that coordinates the work of dozens of climate modelling centres around the world, recommending a common set of model experiments that can collectively shed light on the climate and how it could change.)
Half of the CMIP7 scenarios, Tavoni said, first “overshoot” the 1.5C goal and then “return back”.
The indicative global temperature rise under these seven scenarios is shown in the chart on the right below.
(For more on CMIP7 and the emissions scenarios, see Carbon Brief’s recent guest post).
Tavoni noted that there was no “significant relation” across the scenario database between the cumulative CDR levels a scenario assumes and the level of temperature overshoot it would likely cause.
This, he said, is because “many other factors” contribute to CDR uptake, including the policy environment, progress on emissions reduction in different countries and decisions about what types of emissions might constitute “hard-to-abate” or “residual”. He added:
“You can have scenarios with no ‘negative emissions’, but still a lot of CDR for compensating residual emissions.”
A number of sessions at the conference looked at Earth-system response to overshoot pathways with large-scale CDR.
For example, CMCC’s Dr Momme Butenschön presented research looking at how the oceans would respond to “global net-negative emissions” – a hypothetical situation where more carbon is being removed from the atmosphere than is being added through emissions.
He explained that model runs to 2100 show that a decline in global surface temperature would fail to reduce temperatures in the upper layer of the ocean for at least 30-40 years. Ocean temperatures would “stay flat” during this period due to the ocean’s inertia, he said.
The response to negative emissions further down in the ocean would be even slower, he explained to Carbon Brief:
“If you go to the mesopelagic zone – the twilight zone 200-1,000 metres beneath the surface – the ocean will continue to warm and then, after some years, it will flatten out again. [Its temperature] will not go down.
“And, if you go to the deeper ocean, everything – acidification, deoxygenation, warming – they all continue on their path. So the deep ocean doesn’t even realise you are doing negative emissions.”
The researchers behind the project – named RESCUE – have asked for an extension to run the models up to 2300 so they can better understand what the “long-term reaction” of the ocean to negative emissions technologies would be.
Forests
Speaking in a plenary session, Dr Edwards – assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin and lead author of the 2026 state of CDR report – explained that the “vast majority of CDR that is happening today is so-called ‘conventional’ CDR – so, primarily removal of CO2 from forests”.
Edwards was summarising some of the findings of the latest “state of CDR” report, which says that, at present, 99.9% of existing CDR is “conventional”, land-based techniques such as tree-planting.
The world’s forests currently remove 2.2GtCO2 per year, equivalent to around 5% of gross global CO2 emissions, according to the report. It also notes that “high ambition climate scenarios” will require all forms of CDR to reach a median value of 3.9GtCO2 by 2035 and 8.8GtCO2 by 2050.
Edwards said that conventional CDR methods “tend to be well established and have relatively high readiness levels”. Typically, they also have lower costs – “in some cases less than $10 per tonne of CO2” – than “novel” methods.
Experts pointed out repeatedly throughout the conference that CDR methods would need to be diversified for CDR to achieve levels required to meet climate goals, given land-use constraints and concerns around the permanence of carbon stored in forests.
CMCC’s Shayegh said the world would need a “portfolio” of solutions, given the “big trade-offs” involved in different CDR approaches. He explained:
“For forests, for example, to get the scale you need, you have to have lots of managed land for CDR, which means interfering with agriculture. So you will compete with food and biofuel – and it’s not a very easy or efficient way of creating jobs.”
In a research session, Dr Clemens Schwingshackl from LMU Munich noted that CDR from afforestation and reforestation compensated for about 6% of human fossil-fuel emissions between 2014-23.
However, he said that there was “large uncertainty” in calculations of forest-based CDR. Current bookkeeping models and national greenhouse gas inventories – two key methods for estimating levels of forest-based CDR – have uncertainty rates of 20% and 30%, respectively.
“Missing processes” in bookkeeping models include the impact of disturbances on forests, such as fire, as well as information about the effectiveness of afforestation and reforestation projects, he said.
Dr Giacomo Grassi, scientific officer at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, noted the differences in the ways “conventional” CDR levels are calculated by countries, the “state of CDR” report and by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
CDR, he said, “excludes” CO2 uptake that is not directly caused by human activities. However, separating direct human effects on land from indirect human-caused effects – such as the impacts of climate change – cannot be achieved through observations alone and instead relies on models and model assumptions. He explained:
“Because national greenhouse gas inventories typically rely on observations, they include a broader [human-caused] land carbon sink than what is counted as CDR. As a result, conventional land-based CDR cannot be fully tracked in these inventories.”
Grassi illustrated the different approaches to defining CDR by showing the graphic below.
Barbara Saget from the Paris School of Economics presented the findings of an exercise where researchers used a “dynamic social planner model” to understand the optimum timing and scaling of nature-based and technological CDR and the extent to which net-zero targets can rely on nature-based CDR.
The research showed that nature-based CDR was needed in the medium-term to offset hard-to-abate emissions and limit reliance on more expensive solutions.
However, the model results showed that, as forests grow, an increasing share of captured CO2 is used to compensate for carbon produced during forest disturbances, rather than human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, in the EU, the issue of tight land availability restricts the expansion of forest-based removals. She explained:
“This theoretical model shows that forests are not reliable in the long-run to offset the hard-to-abate emissions, first because of the release of emissions – this reversal risk – but also because of land constraints. So, we need to rely on technological CDR to compensate for these remaining emissions.”
Other forms of CDR
Other research sessions focused on the challenges, uncertainties and opportunities in scaling in other CDR techniques, sometimes referred to as “novel”, “engineered” or “technological” CDR.
In the opening plenary, Edwards noted that, despite making up less than 0.1% of current levels CDR, “novel” solutions were “growing rapidly”.
She added that “the major scale up of novel CDR that we might need to meet climate goals will likely require substantial cost reductions for these technologies”.
Ashwin Murphy, negative emissions fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, explained the various international agreements governing “marine CDR” – a category that includes ocean alkalinity enhancement and direct ocean capture. He said:
“As much promise as marine CDR holds, it also holds the potential for harm, environmental, social and otherwise. The laws that apply to CDR as a whole are unclear, because there are older laws that have been taken out and forced into the CDR framework and that means that they often don’t fit right.
“When a CDR project takes place and for whatever reason there’s an issue – whether it’s environmental harm or otherwise – liability questions are complicated, and there’s not often a clear answer as to what happens next.”
Oumaima Rhalem of Utrecht University described research which looked at the potential of biochar as a CDR technology. She said the findings show that biochar’s potential to tackle climate change depended on a region’s agricultural soils and biomass resources.
In the longer-run, however, she noted that carbon pricing would influence the geography of biochar deployment and would eventually shift biochar from an “agricultural technology” to a “carbon-removal technology”.
Dr Christian Rischer from the Kiel Institute presented findings of a literature review on the CDR potential of blue-carbon ecosystems, such as mangroves, salt marshes, sea grasses and macroalgae.
He said that “low ranges of estimates” suggest these ecosystems currently sequester around 270m tonnes of carbon per year and have a “mitigation potential” of up to 448m tonnes of carbon per year 2050.
Meanwhile, Dr Leon Stephan, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research presented the results of a review of the scientific and “grey” literature – which includes reports, white papers and other evaluations – on monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) of CDR up to 2023.
He noted an “exponential growth” in the MRV literature, with two-thirds of the 184 publications assessed focused on “conventional” CDR approaches, such as afforestation and deforestation. On the other hand, he said, marine CDR, DACCS and bioenergy and carbon capture and storage (BECCS) were “rarely studied” in the MRV literature. The analysis also showed that terminology and definitions were used inconsistently, he said.
The literature focused largely on the quantification of MRV, followed by monitoring and removal quality, he added, noting that there was “very little” on governance of solutions.
The researchers also conducted an analysis of 60 CDR certification methodologies used to issue credits for 11 CDR methods in the voluntary and compliance carbon markets.
IPCC CDR methodology report
The conference comes as the IPCC gears up to publish a methodology report on CDR technologies in 2027.
The report will be produced by the Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, the group responsible for the internationally-agreed methodologies used for countries’ calculation of greenhouse gas emissions and removals.
The European Commission’s Grassi noted the report aims “to provide a consistent methodology that allows countries to report greenhouse gas emissions removal under the UNFCCC [UN Framework Convention on Climate Change]”.
Dr Oliver Geden, senior fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) and Working Group III vice-chair for the IPCC’s seventh assessment cycle, tells Carbon Brief the report will bring together experts on CDR methods, as well as specialists on compiling inventories.
He said the methodology report differed from previous climate inventory reports, given that many of the solutions it would be drawing up guidelines for do not yet exist at scale:
“If you look into the guidelines of established processes, like emissions from gasoline use…you don’t have to measure the emissions, you just have statistics about the activity and then you have an emissions factor. It’s an established process.
“The problem with the methodology report is that it is very unusual that you try to regulate things that are not really there yet…So, it can be problematic to come up with ‘standard removal factors’.”
Nevertheless, he said the report was a “start” and signalled that policymakers had started to take CDR beyond forestry seriously.
He added that it will “need to be reworked constantly because experience with what these methods deliver, and under which circumstances, may change”.
Policy
A significant tranche of the conference was focused on how policy could drive uptake of carbon removal solutions.
Speaking in a plenary, Geden presented a table from the “state of CDR” report, which sets out three types of policy that can drive uptake of CDR.
Geden said that, at present, there was a “lack of robust demand signals” for CDR. This includes measures such as binding targets, government procurement initiatives and tax incentives for buyers.
The state of CDR report notes that the 140 countries around the world that have announced net-zero targets – including virtually all of the world’s major emitters have “implicitly included a role for CDR in their climate plans”.
However, this does not always translate into measures specifically designed to scale up CDR. Only the EU has adopted a binding, quantified removals target into law – namely, the goal to reach 310m tonnes of CO2 equivalent (GtCO2e) of annual net removals in the land sector by 2030.
In general, conventional CDR is the main focus of policy, according to the state of CDR report, with various governments focusing on tree planting to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere.
Speaking in a plenary at the conference, Fabien Ramos, carbon removal lead at the European Commission, detailed the way the bloc was incorporating carbon removals into its policy, both through its headline carbon targets and via the EU emissions trading scheme (EU ETS).
Ramos said that “carbon removal would have a significant role in the ETS in the future”, noting that the EU will need “lots of carbon removal after 2030” to achieve its 2050 net-zero goal.
Geden told Carbon Brief that net-negative emissions would be the “next frontier for European countries to commit to” if overshoot scenarios were to be successfully realised:
“If you talk about exceeding 1.5C and returning, and you need net-negative [emissions] globally. You don’t get to net-negative globally if nobody even plans to go net-negative individually…Currently, only Denmark has a net-negative target right now. Others will have to follow.”
Lucia Dora Simonelli, from US-based non-profit Carbon Removal Standards Initiative, said it would be important to establish how to “weave” the carbon removal process into existing policies. She said:
“This is not about creating a new CDR policy. This is not about creating climate policy. It’s about truly leveraging existing policy infrastructure.”
PIK’s Fuss similarly told Carbon Brief that one of her key takeaways from the conference was the need to “expand the carbon lens and see what other opportunities we have to mainstream CDR into other policy agendas – so, looking at benefits, for instance, in terms of health or adaptation”.
Dr Steve Smith from the University of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise & Environment told Carbon Brief:
“If CDR is to scale to gigatonne levels – as indicated by nearly all global pathways to the Paris Agreement goals – then governments will likely need to introduce markets to create demand for CDR or obligations for it to happen.
“CDR is a public good – like our current waste management systems for sewage – and it’s highly unlikely to happen at that scale through voluntary action alone.”
Societal buy-in
A number of delegates pointed to the need to build societal demand and acceptance for CDR technologies.
Dr Livia Fritz from the University of Geneva presented results of a survey of more than 10,000 people in six countries, focused on three CDR approaches: DACCS, BECCS and enhanced rock weathering. Each respondent was assigned one technology and asked to weigh in on five imagined scenarios of how the solutions would be implemented.
The exercise found that support for CDR hinges on taking “procedural and distributive” fairness “seriously” and opening up planning processes to public and expert scrutiny, she said. It also found that benefit-sharing, as well as not-for-profit arrangements “consistently increase” public support for CDR across all countries and technologies.
Speaking in a plenary, Dr Holly Buck from the University of Buffalo discussed the cultural shift required to enable overshoot scenarios. She explained that a national survey exploring US public opinion about decarbonisation and climate policies – including CDR – had revealed that many members of the US public see the concept of a return to 1.5C from above as “fantastical and implausible”. She said:
“Its not just about social support or acceptance or licence. This sort of industry really requires an active demand or desire for it. It’s not enough to just tolerate [CDR]. It’s not going to work unless there’s a wish that’s felt.”
The post Experts: Why carbon removal needs a ‘major scale up’ to return warming to 1.5C appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Experts: Why carbon removal needs a ‘major scale up’ to return warming to 1.5C
An exceptional El Niño is building. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says it has intensified to very strong levels and is likely to last at least through February 2027. If its current trajectory holds, it could become stronger than anything seen since WMO monitoring began four decades ago.
That is bad news for agriculture. El Niño – a naturally occurring weather phenomenon – can scramble rainfall patterns across the world, bringing drought to some regions and floods to others. And this time it is unfolding against the backdrop of a significantly hotter climate, with farmers already contending with unreliable growing seasons, extreme heat and less predictable rainfall because of global warming.
El Niño expected to bring next record-hot year as soon as 2027
We are seeing the consequences already. In Sri Lanka, drought linked to El Niño has dried wells and reservoirs and cut into crops and farmer incomes. Indonesia is experiencing its worst wildfire season in 11 years, with prolonged drought and extreme heat exacerbated by El Niño. And in Peru, authorities are preparing for the opposite extreme: intense rains, flooding and landslides which the national civil-defence agency says could affect around 1.2 million people.
These impacts will multiply as El Niño intensifies.
And yet, just as the risks to food production are rising, the money available to help farmers withstand them is shrinking.
10% funding decline in 2024
A forthcoming analysis from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) shows that climate-related development finance for agrifood systems is moving in the wrong direction. In 2024, the latest year for which data is available, it fell by 10 percent compared with a 2 percent overall decline. The sectors that put food on our tables — crops, livestock, forestry and fisheries — received just 5 percent.
Yet this is precisely the moment when climate investment in agriculture needs to grow, not shrink. It can help communities adapt, build resilience and protect food security, while unlocking larger flows of public and private finance. Agriculture feeds us, supports the livelihoods of well over a billion people, and is often the first sector hit by drought, floods and extreme heat. Cutting that investment now is a false economy.
One failed harvest can plant the seed for the next crisis, forcing farmers to eat the seed they have saved for planting, sell livestock or tools, or take on debt. It can also deepen food insecurity, disrupt supply chains and drive up prices, showing up months later in supermarket aisles far away.
The Central American Dry Corridor, stretching through much of the region, shows both how exposed farmers are, and what investment can do. Based on an analysis of 41 years of satellite observations, FAO finds that some crop and pasture areas there face more than a 50 percent chance of agricultural drought over the coming months.
About half of Central America’s 1.9 million producers of maize, beans and other basic grains live in the Dry Corridor. Many grow food both for sale and for their own families. When a harvest fails, they lose both income and dinner.
El Salvador project conserves water and soil
In El Salvador, which lies within the Dry Corridor, more than 50,000 farmers have adopted practices to better withstand drought and increasingly unreliable rainfall through RECLIMA, a project financed by the Green Climate Fund and implemented by FAO in partnership with the government of El Salvador. It has substantial national co-financing, including from the country’s Environmental Investment Fund.
El Niño can intensify El Salvador’s annual mid-season dry spell, known as the canícula, turning it into a longer, harsher drought just as maize needs water most.
For María Cristina Corvera de López, a second-generation farmer in rural Nahualapa, adapting means changing how every drop of rain is captured and used. She plants trees alongside her crops to provide shade and minimise evaporation and uses simple irrigation channels and a homemade drip system to conserve water. Instead of burning stalks, leaves and husks after harvest, as generations before her did, she turns them into mulch to hold moisture in the soil.
“The effects of climate change are a constant challenge,” she says. But the new techniques have made her farm more resilient to El Niño as well. Where she once harvested about 50 bags of maize per acre, she now gets around 80, even during droughts. It’s enough to feed her family and sell the surplus.
Managing risk now cuts future costs
Together, these adaptations can mean the difference between losing a crop and getting through a dry season with enough food, seed and income to plant again. They are also the result of climate finance invested before disaster strikes.
RECLIMA shows what that kind of adaptation investment can buy. Adaptation accounted for 45 percent of climate-related development finance to agrifood systems in 2024, and multilateral development banks are directing more agricultural finance towards resilience. That shift reflects a growing recognition that adaptation is a form of risk management, not just a development cost.
We need much more of it. The same investments that help farmers withstand El Niño also enable them to adapt to a hotter, more unpredictable future. Cutting investment in the people who produce our food just as climate risks intensify does not save money. It simply pushes a much larger bill into the next harvest, the next food crisis, and the next El Niño.
The post As El Niño intensifies, we should be investing more in the world’s farmers appeared first on Climate Home News.
As El Niño intensifies, we should be investing more in the world’s farmers
An area of Amazon forest roughly the size of the US state of New Jersey has remained standing due to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s leadership of Brazil, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
Lula beat Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 election to become president of the nation that is home to nearly 60% of the Amazon rainforest.
Forest loss surged during Bolsonaro’s far-right presidency and dropped sharply under the left-wing Lula, with Amazon deforestation likely to hit its lowest level on record this year.
Now, as another presidential election approaches, Lula is facing off against Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio Bolsonaro, whose “anti-environmental” policies are similar to his father’s.
Carbon Brief’s analysis suggests that at least 20,000 square kilometres (km2) of deforestation has been avoided since Lula took office and prioritised Amazon protection.
The analysis is based on modelling by an international research team of an alternative scenario in which Brazil’s flagship forest code legislation was not enforced – a proxy for Jair Bolsonaro’s leadership.
Experts tell Carbon Brief that this estimate is likely “conservative” and that actual deforestation under Bolsonaro could have been “much higher”.
With Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro tied in the polls, the upcoming election is expected to significantly shape the level of environmental action in the world’s fourth-largest emitter, whose emissions are largely driven by deforestation.
‘Brazil is back’
When Jair Bolsonaro was president of Brazil between 2019 and 2022, he championed the nation’s powerful agribusiness sector and oversaw an unprecedented increase in Amazon deforestation.
Bolsonaro weakened regulations, slashed federal agency budgets and empowered illegal activities in the Amazon, while attacking Indigenous and environmental groups.
This meant that the forest code – Brazil’s flagship legislation that requires landowners to preserve and restore forest on their property – was not properly enforced.
After Lula’s presidential victory in 2022, he promised to target “zero deforestation” by 2030, telling the COP27 UN climate summit that “Brazil is back”.
Lula rolled back Bolsonaro’s wave of deregulation and reinstated a deforestation “action plan”. Led by celebrated environmentalist Marina Silva, the environment ministry scaled up enforcement and policing activities in the Amazon.
As a result, annual deforestation in the Amazon has more than halved from 11,594km2 per year in 2022 to 5,731km2 in 2025.
Data from August 2025 to July 2026 – the timespan used in government records – is yet to be released, but preliminary satellite alerts put the deforestation figure at 2,874km2.
While the final figure is likely to be higher, experts still think Amazon deforestation in 2026 could hit its lowest level since records began in 1988.
New Jersey-sized forest
Compared to a scenario in which Bolsonaro won in 2022, Carbon Brief analysis suggests that at least 20,000km2 of Amazon forest remains standing today due to Lula’s leadership.
This area – roughly the size of Wales, Belize, Slovenia or the US state of New Jersey – is indicated by the grey area in the chart below.
This analysis is based on a 2023 study on the role of nature-based solutions in Brazil’s pathway to net-zero emissions. This was a refined update of a 2018 study that used the same GLOBIOM-Brazil model, from researchers at the University of Oxford, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE).
It is based on a comparison of forest code implementation with a “baseline” scenario in which the code is not enforced, reflecting the kind of weak governance seen under the Bolsonaro administration. (See Carbon Brief’s 2022 article for more details of this modelling.)
Dr Aline Soterroni, a University of Oxford researcher who led the 2023 analysis, tells Carbon Brief that the reversal seen under Lula “shows how quickly deforestation can respond to political will”.
However, she stresses that the modelling of the “no forest code” scenario is “relatively conservative”, with deforestation remaining high but not rising.
Deforestation in this scenario – used here as a proxy for a Bolsonaro election win – is tempered by slower demand growth for Brazilian beef and soy, says Soterroni. She notes that the scenario also does not capture the potential for illegal forest clearing in response to weak governance.
Indeed, some experts anticipated in 2022 that a Bolsonaro victory would send deforestation rates rising to near-record levels.
Claudio Angelo, international policy coordinator at Brazil’s Climate Observatory, tells Carbon Brief that if Bolsonaro had won in 2022, “we have reason to believe [this would have resulted] in much higher rates than during his first term”.
Angelo says the “political signal” would likely have driven an “explosion of wildcat mining” and illegal deforestation in the Amazon. He also points to efforts – including by Flávio Bolsonaro – to formally dismantle the forest code in the Brazilian congress, during Jair Bolsonaro’s first term.
Soterroni notes that deforestation rates did not immediately drop following Lula’s election, as suggested by modelling of a full “forest code compliance” scenario. She says this reflects the “gradual and imperfect process” of restoring and enforcing the law.
Nevertheless, she tells Carbon Brief:
“The key message from our modelling is the contrast between these trajectories: weak environmental governance keeps deforestation substantially higher than full implementation of the forest code. That message remains relevant today.”
Election significance
With Jair Bolsonaro in prison for plotting a coup after losing the 2022 election, his son Flávio Bolsonaro, a senator for Rio de Janeiro, is standing against Lula in the upcoming contest for president.
There are 13 candidates, but Flávio Bolsonaro and Lula are by far the frontrunners and are currently neck-and-neck in opinion polls.
If Lula wins, experts say he is likely to continue with the “zero deforestation by 2030” agenda that has already had a pronounced impact on forest loss.
As the chart below shows, periods when Amazon deforestation fell in recent history all occurred during Lula’s three terms as president.
In contrast, experts say Flávio Bolsonaro, a climate sceptic who has indicated he will continue his father’s political agenda and favour agribusiness and mining, will likely drive a surge in deforestation. Angelo tells Carbon Brief:
“At the risk of sounding alarmist, I’ve been saying that Lula’s re-election is the only thing standing between us and a wide destruction of the Amazon.”
A Bolsonaro win would be a “tremendous disaster”, says Dr Patricia Pinho, deputy science director at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, adding:
“I don’t think we can afford four years of increasing deforestation [and] violence against Indigenous peoples.”
Dr David Lapola, an ecologist focused on Amazon research at the University of Campinas in Brazil, says he believes deforestation “would certainly rise” and Brazil’s climate and deforestation goals “would be thrown in the trash bin”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The Bolsonaro administration in the 2019-2022 period showed that the deconstruction of environmental policies and institutes can be done very, very quickly.
“In a matter of a few months, they can destroy what has been constructed over decades of environmental policy and activism in Brazil.”
‘Greenest’ policies
Lula has the “greenest” policy proposals of Brazil’s six top-polling presidential candidates, according to analysis by the Climate Observatory.
The analysis identifies 16 “positive and detailed” environmental commitments in Lula’s proposals, including reaffirming his “zero deforestation by 2030” goal.
Flávio Bolsonaro, on the other hand, has one positive environmental commitment and seven “clearly anti-environmental” proposals.
The right-wing politician has committed to zero “illegal” deforestation by 2029. However, he has also previously led an attempt to change the forest code, opening up large tracts of previously out-of-bounds forest for legal clearance by extractive industries.
Given this, Angelo tells Carbon Brief that he is sceptical about the 2029 pledge.
“The only way you can trust him on this is to think that he is going to revoke the forest code and make all illegal deforestation legal.”
Lula is also the only major candidate to list a clear target for cutting national emissions, sticking with Brazil’s existing goal to cut emissions by 59-67% by 2035, compared to 2005 levels.
Overall, the Climate Observatory notes that climate change and environmental issues “are off the radar for most candidates”, who are instead focusing on the economy and security issues.
Pinho adds that deforestation and the Amazon have not been at the “forefront” of this election, compared to 2022.
If Bolsonaro wins, up to 95% of the Amazon would fall under the leadership of right-wing national governments – including those in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru – reported Mongabay. It noted that presidents in all these nations “explicitly favour agribusiness and mining over environmental conservation”.
If no candidate receives a majority of votes in the first round of Brazil’s election on 4 October, a runoff will take place on 25 October, as has happened at every presidential election since 1998.
Soy moratorium and Brazilian congress
Other factors will also play a role in future deforestation in Brazil, regardless of the next president.
One is the effective end of the Amazon soy moratorium. This is a voluntary agreement signed by companies committing to not buy soya beans grown on land in the Brazilian Amazon that was deforested after 2008.
Conservation organisation WWF’s international director general, Kirsten Schuijt, previously described it as the “most impactful voluntary supply chain policy ever implemented”.
However, major grain traders withdrew from the agreement earlier this year, effectively bringing it to an end. Pinho describes this move as a “huge destruction” of Brazil’s environmental protections.
Research shows the moratorium prevented around 18,000km2 of deforestation in its first decade of operation from 2005-16.
In contrast, a 2026 study estimated that the end of the moratorium could result in 14,000km2 of additional deforestation in the Amazon by 2036.
Alongside choosing a new president on 4 October, Brazilian voters will elect state governors and members of congress, which will also factor into future environmental impacts.
Right-leaning parties, including the far-right Liberal Party linked to the Bolsonaros, currently hold half the seats of the two chambers of congress.
This has led to conflict between lawmakers and Lula. For example, in 2025, congress bypassed Lula’s veto of several aspects of a controversial piece of legislation dubbed the “devastation bill”.
Pinho says that the potential for a right-wing congress and president would be “devastating for the environmental and climate agenda”.
Lapola notes that a Flávio Bolsonaro presidency “would consolidate the view in Brazil that environmental protection is solely a matter of political preference, and not a crucial need of all people”. He adds:
“Land pillage, destruction of precious biodiversity and scorning of Indigenous peoples simply cannot be a nation’s project in the 21st century. We have got to be smarter than that, for sure.”
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The post Analysis: Lula presidency saved at least 20,000km2 of Brazilian Amazon since 2022 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Lula presidency saved at least 20,000km2 of Brazilian Amazon since 2022
This letter is a bit more direct and longer than most of those which I write, but I hope you will be okay with that, because the times seem to call for being plain.
A few weeks ago I got a text message from an old and dear friend —let’s call her Hannah.
I have enough shared life with Hannah that, whenever we talk, the conversation always feels current and effortless, despite gaps of months or even years.
Hannah has been talking with her son — we’ll call him Neil — who is a teenager and doing well in school, but wildly worried about the state of the world, including the imminent trajectory of global warming. Hannah and I don’t text each other other very often, but on this occasion she’s reached out with something visceral:
Neil has challenged me to point him to something hopeful, if I can find it. He says so far no one is showing any will to uphold the Paris Agreement. I am checking in to see how you still manage to have real hope.*
Then, just a few days later, the United Nations Environment Programme Limiting Overshoot report landed, containing the principal finding that it is likely the global temperature will soon exceed 1.5°C.
After that news, and the real time devastation in Nepal, and in the context of the broader state of the world, I found myself having multiple conversations with friends and colleagues about the structure of hope. I want to openly share that after a few of these exchanges, I metaphorically closed the blinds, and wondered how to feel, and what to do, because there is no avoiding the dreadfulness of the news, and what it means for the suffering of people and life on Earth.
But if you are fortunate enough to have time, space and security to do so, then after the darkness, you open the shutters and once again there is light. This is the structure of my innermost resolve.
* * *
Our lives — those of us living on our magnificent earth now — have the greatest possible purpose.
There is virtually no problem that we endlessly clever and creative, human beings cannot solve, when we work together.
And we are not just intelligent and ingenious; we are inherently social, nurturing and brave; capable of the deepest enduring love.
Each of the roughly 12,000 generations of humanity so far has made life possible for those who have followed, through acts of devotion.
Babies have been held and fed. Water and food have been found and shared. Shelter has been built. For 12,000 generations we have held the hands of our children.
Every single one of us was once carried in the arms of another, unable to walk ourselves. It is our thoughtfulness, kindness and care that have seen us through as a species. Sometimes this has been in the most exigent of circumstances, when enough of our ancestors did not give in, faced incredibly difficult things, to somehow make it through.
And so it comes to this. To what we now must do. We must do as 12,000 generations of people did for us.
The struggle to keep global warming to under 1.5 degrees may be over. The battle of return—to get our planet back to safe temperatures at emergency speed and scale — is just beginning. Upon this struggle depends the future of all we care about, and that of all life on Earth. The prospects of the next 12,000 generations are conditioned by our efforts now.
Our work now is to keep the overshoot as low as we can, make it as brief as possible, and do everything within our power to alleviate other pressures on nature. It is to take care of humanity — of one another — in the face of mounting climate and ecological damage. And by these efforts, create the conditions for future flourishing. Every fraction of every degree matters.
What must now be done is hard, much tougher than should have been necessary, because of the vested interests in coal, oil and gas and deforestation, and the failures of decision makers. And while renewable energy has surged, making the case for change much simpler, on the other side of the ledger there’s the reactionary and gangsterist turn of politics and the multiplier effects of wars and mass violence, with the existential destabilisation of big tech looming over all.
There is no sugarcoating the scale of difficulty. But what is necessary remains within our collective power. We must never, for one second, say that returning our planet to flourishing is impossible — many of the obvious solutions already exist; but even where transformation relies on reforms, technologies or capabilities that might sound fanciful, or historical changes that are unprecedented, this can be no barrier to our conviction. After all, much of what we take for granted today as ordinary features of social life, would have been considered impossible by every single generation before us.
The world has not been destroyed by nuclear war; we solved the growing hole in the ozone layer; Antarctica was kept sacrosanct from exploitation. Humanity has collectively triumphed before, and can do so again.
We can find the necessary social and political will to do what is needed because these are endlessly renewable resources. The necessary financial capital exists. Apart from the fossil fuel industry, the greatest barrier we face is to mistakenly concede that what lies before us is insurmountable. It is not.
We must avoid the siren song of fatalism. Because. It. Is. Never. Too. Late.
None of which is to be insensitive to the horrors already unleashed — the deadly and grotesque harm to people, places and species that cannot be undone; or to be blind to the impacts that are coming. But where we have the power to act, we also have the responsibility — and the extraordinary privilege — to do what must be done.
Although she is wounded, our planet is still alive and beautiful beyond all of our comprehension. Hundreds of billions of creatures live and thrive still upon this earth. Nothing has happened until it has happened, and life fights for life. Every beetle, every tree, all the fish in the ocean, the smallest of the geothermal shrimps, the greatest of the whales and the mightiest of the birds — all demand life every second of their existence, so that their species too may have future generations.
No individual has to know how to solve this alone. Indeed, finding some detachment and humility is essential to concentrate on the role that each of us can play.
Hope is not merely a mindset or a story we tell ourselves. Collective power is not abstract; it is what we do, together, applying ourselves to the practical mechanics of change and contestation within society, by being part of the organisations and networks of people that are dedicated to effective strategies. It is why I am so committed to Greenpeace.
Working from without and within, there are opportunities to make rapid change within institutions, governments, businesses and communities to create the social, economic and political momentum for emissions reduction at speed and scale, reminding ourselves always of what remains possible, even if it hasn’t happened yet.
We can return the planet to safer temperatures. We can put technologies back in the service of people and life. We can return to the assumptions that seemed so obvious just one generation ago — that it is both possible, and our obligation, to build a better future for all people, and for life on Earth.
I did write back to Hannah and Neil, to say honestly to a treasured friend and her son, that yes, as a matter of faith, conviction, evidence and strategy, absolutely there is real hope. And this is a pledge not just to Neil and his generation, but to the next 12,000.
Together, we have the power. Together, we cross this bridge through the dark. To secure an Earth capable of nurturing life in all of its magnificent diversity.
We did not choose to carry this historic responsibility, but here we are. And it is so lucky that we are here.
I wouldn’t choose any other time to be here, alive on Earth, with you.
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