Senator Flávio Bolsonaro (PL), son of former president Jair Bolsonaro and candidate in Brazil's presidential runoff, said on Friday night (23) that he intends to end illegal deforestation in the country by 2029 and wants federal environmental agencies to operate without what he called "ideological locks". He made the statements in an interview with journalist Renata Lo Prete on Jornal da Globo, right after the final runoff debate against President Lula (PT) at the Globo studios in Rio de Janeiro, according to G1.
Asked whether he would keep the current administration's environmental protection policies, the candidate committed to ending illegal deforestation by 2029 but did not guarantee the continuity of the actions now under way. In the same interview, he said the current government took no initiative to fight fires in the Amazon and defended deploying the Armed Forces in the region.
"This issue is sometimes much more criminal than environmental, and the Armed Forces will work to fight crimes in the Amazon. The Air Force, for example, will be reequipped with technology to fly over the area and inspect it, and the police will be called in to arrest the people who are doing the illegal deforestation", the candidate said.
Pressed on the enforcement work of Ibama, Brazil's federal environmental agency, and ICMBio, the institute that manages federal conservation units, Flávio said both bodies "unfortunately are not being effective" and stated that under his government they "will respect the law". As an example of enforcement he would review, he cited the region of Altamira and the municipalities crossed by the Transamazonica highway in Pará state, where he claimed Ibama is "taking over the property" of settlers who were encouraged to occupy the area decades ago. "They will stop persecuting, for example, the people who live there in Pará", he said.
A forest under scientific warning
The candidate's promises come at a moment of heightened alarm over the forest's health. A study published Wednesday (21) in the journal Nature by researchers at Inpe, Brazil's space research institute, with funding from the São Paulo research foundation Fapesp, calculated that the Amazon released 1.17 billion tons of CO2 more than it absorbed per year on average between 2010 and 2024, Folha de S.Paulo reported. Fires accounted for roughly 1.47 billion tons of annual emissions, far above the forest's absorption capacity, estimated at 300 million tons a year.
The pattern is repeating now in Manaus and across Amazonas state: Inpe has already counted more than 41,300 fire hotspots in the Amazon in less than ten months of 2026, 58% of them in September and October alone, against 43,100 in all of 2025. The smoke forced schools in Manaus to suspend classes, strained the health system with respiratory cases and prompted an environmental crime investigation into suspected deliberate burning.
For the study's authors, reversing the imbalance requires drastically cutting fires, ending deforestation and restoring degraded areas, or the forest risks reaching a tipping point. "The main message of the research is shocking: the Amazon's problem is human action. We need public policies that value the standing forest", climate scientist Luciana Gatti, head of Inpe's Greenhouse Gas Laboratory and lead author of the paper, told Folha.
Flávio and Lula face off in the presidential runoff this Sunday (25). The TV Globo confrontation was the last debate between the two before the vote and was marked by personal attacks, as reported by G1 and BBC Brasil.