Brazil's Indigenous Lands and Pantanal Confront Escalating Deforestation

A new digital platform called IndiMap has been developed to centralise and disseminate public alerts on deforestation and fires affecting Indigenous territories in Brazil. The system integrates data from BDQueimadas/INPE, DETER/TerraBrasilis and MapBiomas Alerta, and early evaluations by Indigenous representatives, technical staff and institutional agents reported positive feedback regarding clarity, ease of use and relevance of the alerts.

The Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland spanning Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay, is experiencing severe ecological damage. Between 2001 and 2025 more than 10 % of native vegetation in the Brazilian portion was lost, and in 2020 fires burned an estimated 45 000 km²—about a third of the biome—largely linked to illegal agribusiness burning for pasture expansion. Federal police have indicted four farmers for orchestrating the fires, highlighting the region’s ongoing ecocide risk.