Brazil submitted its national Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) target to the United Nations for the first time on Tuesday, August 25. The commitment, announced by Environment and Climate Change Minister João Paulo Capobianco, sets a goal of recovering and restoring more than 163,000 square kilometers of degraded land by 2030, part of a broader set of actions covering 3.67 million square kilometers, equal to 43.1% of Brazil's territory, according to newspaper Folha de S.Paulo.
The announcement came during the 17th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (COP17), held in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, a summit that began August 17 and runs through Friday, August 28, with delegates from the convention's 197 member countries, according to Brazil's Ministry of Environment and Climate Change (MMA). Brazil had owed this commitment since 2018, when COP13 asked signatory countries to draft voluntary national plans on the issue.
According to the ministry, the target is made up of 17 sub-goals split across three fronts: restoring land that is already degraded, slowing degradation processes underway, and preventing new losses. Of the 163,000 km² earmarked for restoration, the plan includes recovering native vegetation, expanding agroforestry systems and taking action inside conservation units, Indigenous Territories, legally protected riparian zones and river basins. Another 3.51 million km² fall under prevention, conservation and sustainable land management measures.
The scale of the problem shows in the government's own figures: Brazil's Land Degradation Index estimates that about 2.3 million km², or 28% of the country's territory, already shows some degree of degradation, and the LDN baseline found 55.7 million hectares trending toward degradation as of 2020. The MMA estimates 39 million Brazilians live in 1,649 municipalities located in or near areas susceptible to desertification. A 2023 study by disaster-monitoring agency Cemaden and Brazil's space research institute Inpe, cited by Folha, found that semi-arid regions of Brazil expanded by an average of 75,000 km² per decade since 1960, with the caatinga scrubland of northern Bahia state registering the country's first stretch of arid climate, where evaporation now outpaces rainfall replenishment.
River basins under strain
A study by Brazil's National Water and Sanitation Agency (ANA), cited by the MMA, projects declining water flows across most of the country's hydrographic regions, with the sharpest drops expected in the North and Northeast, including the Tocantins-Araguaia, Parnaíba and São Francisco river basins, which cover parts of MATOPIBA, a fast-expanding agribusiness frontier spanning Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia. "Healthy soils sustain farming production, food security, biodiversity and water availability," Capobianco said, according to the ministry, adding that more frequent extreme weather events make land restoration also a resilience strategy for rural communities.
Tracking the promise
To track the commitments, the government revived Brazil's National Commission to Combat Desertification (CNCD) in 2024. The body, created under Law 13,153/2015, had gone unstaffed for eight years, the ministry said. Its relaunch, formalized through Decree 11,932, is the mechanism the government says it will use going forward to monitor whether the 17 restoration and prevention sub-goals stay on track for the 2030 deadline.