Andre Cabette Fabio

As Brazil prepares to host the COP30 climate summit in the Amazon city of Belém in November, President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva is under pressure to veto a measure that could have a huge impact on the world's largest tropical rainforest.

The bill, according to critics, would dismantle the environmental licensing process in Brazil, home to the biggest share of the Amazon rainforest.

As global temperatures smashed records last year, wildfires raged in South America, driving record global tropical forest loss, according to more than 20 years of data from the environmental NGO World Resources Institute.

The unprecedented damage complicates the target to halt and reverse deforestation and forest degradation by 2030, agreed upon by more than 140 countries at the COP26 U.N. climate change conference in 2021.

As global temperatures smashed records last year, wildfires broke new ground in the Amazon, impacting more than 6.7 million hectares in Brazil, where most of the vast rainforest is located.

That is more than double the previous record, and the highest figure that mapping consortium MapBiomas has registered in its data series dating back to 1985.

From the riverside settlement of Puranga Conquista in the Amazon rainforest, Elisângela Borges ships lotions, soaps, shampoos and oils from her own line of products to faraway cities in Brazil, India and the United States.

Speaking on her porch by the Negro River, Borges said her company, Yara Amazonas, started a partnership with loggers to extract oils and seeds from the forest, instead of cutting trees down.

U.S. President Donald Trump's chaotic tariff war could boost appetite for Brazil's farm goods as China seeks to substitute U.S. agricultural imports, with potentially negative environmental consequences.

During Trump's first term, Brazil benefited from China's efforts to reduce its dependence on U.S. agricultural products amid a trade dispute between the world's two biggest economies.

As fossil fuel burning and global temperatures continue to reach records, Brazil is preparing to host the COP30 U.N. climate change conference in November in Belém in the Amazon rainforest, which is suffering its third year of drought.

It comes a decade after talks in Paris reached a landmark global agreement to limit climate change, which U.S. President Donald Trump has vowed to leave for the second time.

Labouring in a workshop near Brazil's rainforest, a group of women snips, sews and paints fabric with traditional patterns for their fashion collective, using industrial machines bought with money from the first Amazon community fund fully run by Indigenous people.

The Ateliê Derequine Indigenous fashion collective, founded in 2020 to produce masks against COVID-19, dresses models and takes part in runway shows in Brazil's industrial metropolis of Manaus, providing jobs and a platform for Indigenous rights campaigns.

Under a blue April sky in Brasilia, the skyline is cut by sculptural, air-conditioned modernist buildings. The structures are surrounded by parking lots and curving, broad avenues with concrete sidewalks.

Brasilia was purposely built here, a modernist push by governments in the 1950s and 1960s largely to help occupy the country's vast interior.

At Brazil's largest Indigenous gathering in the nation's capital this week, filmmakers are illustrating how cinema and social media can spotlight their culture and struggles as they demand protection for land rights.

On a recent rainy evening, about two dozen film enthusiasts sat on stands alongside a projector, watching as Amazon filmmaker Takumã Kuikuro displayed a ritual of the Fulni-ô people.

Brazil is bracing for the "high risk" that wildfires will ravage the Amazon rainforest and Pantanal wetlands in 2025 after the country faced a record drought last year, leaving many regions vulnerable and susceptible to renewed flames.

Even though much of Brazil is in the middle of the rainy season, most of the country faced drought at the beginning of the year, data from Brazil's National Water Agency showed.