Brazil's burned area fell to about 12.7 million hectares in 2025, down from 30 million hectares in 2024. The Amazon rainforest recorded its lowest number of fires in 41 years, according to MapBiomas data reported by the BBC on July 21, 2026.

That is a big drop. The 2025 figures are 31% below the long-term average, mostly because of the Amazon's improvement. Vera Arruda, a researcher at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) and coordinator at MapBiomas, told the BBC: "The 2025 figures are significant and show that it is possible to reduce the burned area in the country." But she also warned that the result "does not yet allow us to conclude that this is an established trend or to scale back prevention efforts."

To understand how big this change is, you need to know how bad 2024 was. That year, Brazil's burned area grew 79% compared to 2023 and was 62% above the historical average, according to MapBiomas's Monitor do Fogo. The Amazon alone accounted for about 17.9 million hectares burned, or 58% of the national total. Both the Amazon and the Atlantic Forest (Mata Atlântica) set records for burned area in 2024. Nearly one-third (29%) of all the land that burned in Brazil that year went up in mega fires, each exceeding 100,000 hectares. The BBC described the 2024 Amazon fires as the worst in over two decades, attributing that assessment to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, which cited "climate extremes and human activity."

What changed between 2024 and 2025 has a lot to do with the Pacific Ocean. The 2025 decline was helped by cooler La Niña conditions replacing the warmer El Niño pattern that dominated during 2024's fire season. El Niño and La Niña are two sides of a natural cycle in the Pacific that shifts weather around the globe. Think of them like a thermostat for the atmosphere. El Niño turns the heat up, bringing warmer and drier conditions to parts of South America. La Niña turns it down, bringing cooler and wetter weather that makes fires less likely. MapBiomas has warned, though, that El Niño could return and extend the 2025 dry season, increasing the risk of fires.

The improvement built gradually over the year. The Monitor do Fogo reported a 70% reduction in burned area across Brazil in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. By July 2025, Brazil had its smallest monthly burned area in seven years: 748,000 hectares, a 40% drop compared to July 2024. Of that monthly total, 75% was native vegetation.

Not everything that burns in Brazil is untouched forest. In 2024, pastures made up 53.2% of the burned area in the Amazon. Across the Amazon and Atlantic Forest combined, more than 55% of what burned was on land already altered by human use. This means fire in Brazil is not just about cutting down new parts of the forest. It is also tied to how people manage land, including burning old pastures to regrow grass or clearing ground for farming. Those fires can spread into standing forest when conditions are dry.

For context, the worst year on record for Brazil's burned area was 2007, when 30.7 million hectares burned. The 2024 total of 30 million hectares came close to that. The 2025 Amazon total of about 3.1 million hectares is the smallest since records for the biome began in 1985.

The broader context here is that weather and human choices work together in ways that are hard to separate. La Niña helped reduce fires in 2025, but giving all the credit to the ocean would ignore other factors like law enforcement, fire prevention efforts, and how land is used. In the same way, El Niño alone did not cause the 2024 spike. The fact that so much of what burned was on human-altered land points to people as the main driver, with weather acting as an amplifier. Arruda's caution makes sense: one cooler year does not mean the problem is solved, and if El Niño returns, it could test whether these gains hold.

MapBiomas published its latest Annual Fire Report (Relatório Anual do Fogo) showing that Brazil's 2025 burned area fell below the historical average. The BBC refers to this as "the MapBiomas report" without specifying the product line or providing a direct release URL.