What Brazil’s Election Could Mean for the Amazon and the Climate Crisis

This series examines key climate and environmental policies, comparing Jair Bolsonaro’s record from 2019 to 2023, Lula’s record since he took office in 2023, and what a future Lula or Flávio Bolsonaro administration might mean. We will publish pieces on forest protection, Indigenous lands, environmental defenders, fossil fuels, and agribusiness. Please visit our website to see them as they are published. 

Brazilians return to the polls on October 25 to choose between President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro. In the first round on October 4, Flávio Bolsonaro received 47.03 percent to Lula’s 45.16 percent. The outcome could shape Brazil’s climate and environmental policies for years to come—with far-reaching consequences for the Amazon and other threatened ecosystems, for Indigenous peoples and traditional communities, and for the global effort to fight climate change.

Climate and the environment have not figured prominently in either campaign, yet nine in ten Brazilians in a recent Ipsos poll said candidates should present plans to tackle the climate crisis.  What the next government does on these issues will matter enormously for a country already confronting disasters worsened by climate change, including devastating floods in the south, severe drought in the Amazon, and the hot, dry conditions that helped fuel fires across the Pantanal wetlands.

The elder Bolsonaro is not a candidate, but his presidency offers a useful guide to how his son, his anointed successor as leader to the Bolsonarista political movement, might approach climate policy. During those four years, the government gutted forest enforcement, and Amazon deforestation reached its highest level in 15 years. Flávio’s platform calls for a crackdown on environmental crime but says nothing about the climate crisis.  He once called global warming a “farce” and, when pressed in an August interview, declined to say whether it exists.

Lula has a mixed record on environmental policy, but unlike his opponent, he has consistently called for urgent action on climate change, warning world leaders in 2023 that “the planet is burning” and, at the COP30 summit he hosted last year, calling for “a clear roadmap” to end the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.

Ultimately, how their divergent views of the climate crisis translate into policywill also depend on whether Brazil’s courts remain willing and able to block unlawful rollbacks of environmental and human rights protections, including those pushed through a Congress in which the right and the agribusiness caucus strengthened their dominance in the October 4 vote. And it will depend on whether the next president and his administration are prepared to protect and support the environmental defenders and local communities fighting to save the country’s forests.