Forestry
The Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest and mostly contained within Brazil, making Brazilian forestry policy one of the most important climate-related policies in the world. Roughly half the slowdown in deforestation in the late-2000s was a result of deliberate government policy. Having greatly reduced large-scale deforestation, Brazil’s challenge now is to address small-scale deforestation, which may require different policy approaches.
Common drivers of deforestation, such as commodity prices, and land protection appear to have changed deforestation patterns, with large scale deforestation declining much more rapidly than small scale (e.g. tracts of less than 25 hectares).