Record breaking areas of Brazil’s land goes up in flames. And Earth Innovation Institute proposes the false solution of selling carbon credits to the oil and gas industry

Earth Innovation Institute pretends to be oblivious to what is driving drought and forest fires in Brazil, which is, of course, the fossil fuel industry.

PHOTO Credit: MapBiomas.

In 2024, 30 million hectares of land in Brazil was burned. That’s an area 62% above the historical average area burned each year in the country. It is an area approximately the size of Italy.

The figures come from a report released on 24 June 2025 by MapBiomas, which is a network of NGOs, universities, and technology companies that began satellite monitoring in 1985.

The report shows that almost half of all the area burned in Brazil since 1985 was burned in the last decade. MapBiomas states that,

A quarter (24%) of the country's territory, equivalent to the combined areas of Pará and Mato Grosso, burned at least once between 1985 and 2024. In the last four decades, 206 million hectares were affected by fire with different intensities in each of the country's six biomes.

In 2024, Brazil saw its worst drought in seven decades — exacerbated by global heating.

AFP reports that Felipe Martenexen, MapBiomas’s Amazon coordinator, said at a press conference,

“The combination of highly flammable vegetation, low humidity, and the use of fire has created the perfect conditions for [fires] to spread on a large scale. Once the forest burns, it ends up losing moisture and forest cover. It ends up altering that entire microclimate, making it more vulnerable next time to new fires.”

The Pantanal

The Pantanal is the world’s largest tropical wetland area, covering a total area of more than 17 million hectares. Most of the Pantanal is in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, but it also extends into Mato Grosso as well as Bolivia and Paraguay.

Of the six biomes in Brazil, proportionally the Pantanal has been the most affected by fire in the last four decades. 62% of the Pantanal has burned at least once since 1985. And 72% of that area has burned two or more times.

In 2024, there was a 157% increase in the area of land that burned in the Pantanal compared to the historical average.

Eduardo Rosa, coordinator for the Pantanal at MapBiomas says that,

“Historical data shows the dynamics of fire in the Pantanal, which is related to the presence of natural vegetation and periods of drought. In 2024, the biome burned in the region around the Paraguay River, a region that has experienced the longest periods of drought since the last major flood in 2018.”

The Amazon

In 2024, more land burned than in any year since 1985. The Amazon was the biome that saw by far the most fires in the country. About 15.6 million hectares of land in the Amazon burned in 2024. That’s 117% higher than the historical average.

MapBiomas states that the Amazon was “the main epicentre of fires in Brazil last year”.

6.7 million hectares of forest were burned, compare to 5.2 million hectares of burned pasture. Historically, pasture was always more affected by fire than forests in the Amazon biome.

Felipe Martenexen, Amazon biome mapping coordinator at MapBiomas, points out that,

“Fire is not a natural element of the ecological dynamics of the Amazon forests. The burned areas that marked the biome in 2024 are the result of human action, especially in a scenario aggravated by two consecutive years of severe drought. The combination of highly flammable vegetation, low humidity and the use of fire created the perfect conditions for its propagation on a large scale, leading to a historic record of burned area in the region.”

Brazil is hosting COP30 in November 2025. The data from MapBiomas is devastating for Brazil’s claims to be addressing the climate crisis. As is the fact that the country is in the process of auctioning 172 oil and gas exploration blocks — which could result in the release of 11 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent if the oil and gas in these blocks were to be extracted and burned.

Enter the false solution of carbon markets

On the same day that MapBiomas’s report came out, the Earth Innovation Institute also put out a report titled, “The big climate solution of the Amazon Forest needs the carbon market”.

In the report, Earth Innovation Institute claims that,

On the road to COP 30, Brazil can unlock the carbon market and lead the world in nature-based solutions to the climate emergency.

Earth Innovation Institute acknowledges that in recent years, the Amazon rainforest have become a net source of greenhouse gas emissions. But it argues that this could be reversed and,

The Amazon forest could again become a major carbon sink . . . if deforestation continues to decline steeply, if innovations in forest fire prevention and control are replicated, and if natural forest regeneration is released on abandoned lands.

Of course we should encourage Brazil to reduce deforestation, reduce fires, and allow natural forest regeneration on abandoned lands. But at the same time, we should face the reality that those are three enormous “ifs”.

Earth Innovation Institute has an initiative called the “Amazon forest climate solution”, which it claims is “achievable in the near future”. All we need, according to Earth Innovation Institute is to implement jurisdictional REDD in order to generate carbon credits for the fossil fuel industry.

Earth Innovation Institute appears oblivious to the fact that jurisdictional REDD in the state of Pará is currently facing a lawsuit, as well as opposition from Indigenous and Quilombola communities.

Earth Innovation Institute remains confident that Jurisdictional REDD (JREDD+) programmes could raise somewhere between US$10 billion and US$20 billion by 2030.

The only thing standing in the way is “widespread misunderstanding of how it works”.

Earth Innovation Institute is very clear about how jurisdictional REDD works.

Enter Petrobras

COP 30, according to Earth innovation Institute “is an opportunity to unlock the carbon market”.

And one of the ways that Earth Innovation Institute suggests that the Brazilian government could “unlock the potential of JREDD+” is by “Encouraging Petrobras to lead oil & gas companies to buy JREDD+ credits”.

Petrobras is to play a key role in Earth Innovation Institute’s plans:

Business as usual for the fossil fuel industry

Of course, the reality of Earth Innovation Institute’s insane proposal is business as usual for the fossil fuels industry.

Earth Innovation Institute pretends to be oblivious to the fact that burning fossil fuels is what is driving the climate crisis.

The fossil fuel industry is responsible for the droughts in Brazil that have resulted in 30 million hectares of land going up in smoke in 2024. And it’s not just in Brazil — deforestation from forest fires hit a record high globally in 2024.

The fossil fuel industry is also responsible for the massive destruction and pollution resulting from extracting fossil fuels.

Yet Earth Innovation Institute (and not for the first time) is more than happy to get into bed with the most destructive corporations on planet earth.

This is just one more illustration of the real purpose of carbon trading, which is to extend the life of the fossil fuel industry, and the associated extractivism and destruction, for as long as possible.