Why Brazil's Presidential Election Could Have an Impact on the Environment

🇧🇷 🗳️ Bolsonaro edges past Lula as Brazil vote goes to run-off Right-wing senator Flavio Bolsonaro pulled off a surprise first-place finish ahead of leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Sunday's Brazilian election, receiving 47% of the votes to the incumbent's 45%. The two candidates will face off again in a 25 October run-off

— AFP News Agency (@AFP) October 5, 2026

Maybe you live in another country, or on another continent, and think that Brazil’s presidential election has nothing to do with you. Allow us to disagree.

About 60% of the Amazon rainforest is in Brazil. The forest stores an estimated 150 billion to 200 billion tons of carbon. If released, this will make the extreme—sometimes fatal—weather events we’ve experienced recently much more likely.

Decisions made in Brazil shape our collective future, and Brazilians are about to make a huge choice.

On October 4, 2026, Flávio Bolsonaro—the Trump-allied son of jailed former President Jair Bolsonaro and a climate change denier—took the largest vote share from the first presidential round. But he fell short of an outright win, meaning he’ll face the leftist incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in a second round on October 25, 2026.

The clock is ticking. Campaigns so far have focused largely on the state of Brazil’s democracy and its international relations. But for many, the threat is more existential.

Lula has promised zero deforestation by 2030. Bolsonaro has pledged to halt illegal deforestation by 2030. You see the difference.

Under Bolsonaro’s father, Brazil’s forest laws routinely went unenforced, and the agency responsible for enforcement received extreme budget cuts, which seemed to create a culture of impunity for illegal deforestation and Indigenous land invasions. Bolsonaro and his politician sons were also openly hostile to journalists.

Experts predict that Bolsonaro would follow in his father’s footsteps and aim to dismantle environmental regulations, signaling to his powerful agribusiness support base that the Amazon is open for business. Mining, too, could expand. Bolsonaro would also likely deny Indigenous land claims that are in the process of being formalized.

Lula, meanwhile, has a mixed record on Amazon conservation. Recent official figures put the rate of deforestation in the first half of 2026 at its lowest in a decade. An analysis by U.K.-based climate news site Carbon Brief found that Lula’s current term had avoided the loss of an area of tropical forest equivalent in size to New Jersey.

Yet, his administration has continued to open up new parts of the forest to oil and gas drilling, as well as offshore plots that affect the mouth of the iconic river and Indigenous people living upstream.

Tropical forest reporting supported by the Pulitzer Center has brought to light vital information that helps audiences better understand the scale of critical threats to the rainforest, and the actors and organizations responsible. This journalism includes the following:

• “Over 800 Million Trees Felled To Feed Appetite for Brazilian Beef”: Back in 2023, Rainforest Investigations Network Fellow Elisângela Mendonça, along with other journalists, showed that deforestation linked to foreign-beef demand under Bolsonaro senior (2017-2022) was at least equivalent in size to the entire New York metropolitan area. Or put another way, some 800 million trees.
• “Collagen Craze Drives Deforestation and Rights Abuses”: Also in 2023, Mendonça, Pulitzer Center grantee Fábio Zuker, and journalist Andrew Wasley found that collagen, a commodity at the heart of a global wellness frenzy, contributed to deforestation and land invasions. Collagen has been linked to a brand that was endorsed by actress Jennifer Aniston.

More RIN Fellows have been at the leading edge of rainforest investigations:

• Financial Market: A Black Box Over Green Areas: Bruna Bronoski showed how meat giants raised billions of dollars in stock market-backed finance schemes despite links to deforestation and Indigenous land dispossessions.
• Fernanda Wenzel revealed some of the land grabbing industry’s core dynamics and main players, while Daniel Camargos exposed a businessman connected to Brazil’s vast soy industry who had seized public land.
• Blood Timber War: Karla Mendes unveiled a timber laundering scheme that allowed wood from the Arariboia Indigenous Territory to reach international markets, including the United States and the European Union, and revealed the killings of Indigenous Guajajara people linked to the industry.
• Deforestation Runways: The Expansion of Illegal Mining in the Amazon: Hyury Potter produced a groundbreaking, data-driven investigation into illegal airstrips that had enabled significant quantities of illegally mined gold to be flown out of the region undetected.
• The Impact of Parliamentary Amendments on the Degradation of the Brazilian Rainforest: More recently, Flávio Ferreira showed how politicians were misusing government funds and profiting from a road-building scheme that could allow for further penetration into the forest by illegal loggers and land-grabbers.
• Isabel Harari’s investigations have focused on the threats to the forest posed by the rush for critical minerals, which the election could have consequences for.

Trump wants privileged access to Brazil’s rare earths and metals that are essential for the energy transition. Lula recently denied this as a condition for averting trade tariffs. Bolsonaro would likely comply. Many fear that if Bolsonaro wins later this month, the culture of impunity for rainforest crimes that pervaded under his father would return.

With the fate of the Amazon hanging in the balance, Brazilians face a choice: reviving a project that saw huge spikes in deforestation, or re-electing a president who has managed to bring deforestation rates down since the turn of the century.

That choice will be felt way beyond Brazil's borders.