Forest policy diagnostics for Brazil

This report is part of a wider inquiry into the intertwined challenges of climate change, deforestation and policy design, where global environmental goals depend on highly local realities. Forest loss remains a major driver of emissions, but its causes and trajectories vary widely across regions, shaped by governance systems, economic pressures and social dynamics. Moving beyond generic prescriptions, this study adopts a context-sensitive perspective that asks not only what policies exist, but how and where they are likely to be effective. In Brazil, home to the largest share of the Amazon rainforest, deforestation has followed a striking trajectory—marked by rapid expansion, periods of strong decline, and more recent fluctuations—reflecting shifts in political priorities, enforcement capacity and market conditions. This variability makes Brazil a critical case for understanding how policy mixes perform over time and across changing contexts. The report applies a diagnostic framework that connects spatial patterns (archetypes) of forest change with the behavioural mechanisms that policies seek to influence, from strict enforcement and monitoring to incentives and supply chain pressures. By examining how these instruments interact with different deforestation contexts, it highlights why similar approaches can succeed or fail depending on where they are applied. Brazil’s experience underscores both the power of coordinated policy action and the variation in outcomes over time, offering important lessons for designing more resilient and adaptive strategies to curb deforestation.