Michel Valette , Yiannis Kountouris, Anna Freni Sterrantino, Jeremy Woods, Morena Mills

Over the last decade, carbon emissions due to forest degradation in the Brazilian Amazon, linked mainly to logging and wildfires, became larger than carbon emissions due to deforestation. Climatic and ecological processes affect the landscape’s flammability, while socio-economic processes influence the use of fire for deforestation and agricultural land management. However, a comprehensive spatially explicit analysis of the relative influence of these processes on deforestation, agricultural and forest fires in the Brazilian Amazon, as well as how their influences changed during the recent weakening of environmental governance, was still missing. Here we show how the climate, land use and anti-deforestation policies are affecting all types of fires, which are increasingly affecting the remote part of the region. Among agricultural land, pastures are associated with the highest number of deforestation and agricultural fires, while perennials crops are associated with the smallest. All types of protected areas are associated with fewer forest and deforestation fires, especially integral protection and indigenous lands, but they are facing increasing pressures from their surroundings and fires are becoming more frequent on their peripheries. Our results show both agricultural and environmental policies are critical to prevent deforestation and forest degradation and highlight the importance of area-based conservation initiatives to curb fire and reduce environmental degradation within tropical rainforests.