Monica Piccinini
1 February 2026
Often overlooked in global conservation debates, Brazil’s Cerrado is being rapidly transformed by industrial agriculture, with UK trade playing a direct role in the loss of water systems, biodiversity and climate stability.
As global demand for commodities grows, Brazil’s Cerrado is being lost at an alarming rate, with consequences that reach far beyond South America. This extending mix of grasslands, savannas, and forests plays a key role in South America’s water systems and climate, yet it’s one of the continent’s most threatened ecosystems.
The destruction of the Cerrado reaches the UK through the food we eat, turning a regional crisis into a shared responsibility with global consequences.
A scientific review in Nature Conservation finds that over half of the Cerrado’s native vegetation has vanished, mostly in the last five decades. That’s roughly 1,000,000 square kilometres, larger than France and Germany combined, now replaced by farmland, pastures, and expanding towns.
Often described as Brazil’s hydrological engine, the Cerrado feeds eight of the country’s twelve major river basins. Its continued degradation threatens water security far beyond its borders, with consequences felt across much of South America.
According to Cássio Cardoso Pereira, researcher at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and the lead author of the review, the ecological damage extends far beyond habitat loss:
The most urgent consequence is the disruption of the Cerrado’s role as a continental water regulator. The loss of native vegetation reduces aquifer recharge, dries up rivers that supply important hydrographic basins in South America, and exacerbates droughts and extreme heatwaves.
At the same time, we are losing unique biodiversity and enormous underground carbon reserves, which makes this destruction a direct threat to both species and climate stability.
The Cerrado is the second largest Ecodomain in South America, after the Amazon, occupying 23% of Brazil’s surface.
The authors of the review use the term “Ecodomain” to refer to large ecological areas that include multiple ecosystems, biomes, and ecoregions. The term describes these regions as they existed in their original extent, regardless of their current state of conservation.
Soy and beef
The destruction of the Cerrado is not driven by Brazil alone, it’s closely tied to global demand for soy and beef, commodities that bind this landscape directly to the UK’s food system and climate footprint.
Industrial agriculture drives much of this loss. Since satellite monitoring began in 2001, over 326,000 square kilometres of the Cerrado have been cleared, sometimes faster than even the Amazon.
Soy plantations and cattle ranches now dominate large areas that once supported extraordinary biodiversity. These landscapes, mainly monocultures, depend on heavy machinery, fertilisers and agrochemicals, leaving little room for ecosystems to recover.
The review highlights the MATOPIBA region, covering the states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia, as a focal point of recent land-use change, where agricultural expansion continues to push deep into remaining native vegetation.
Deforestation is reshaping the Cerrado’s climate: the rainy season now arrives about a month later, overall rainfall has dropped, and daytime temperatures have climbed roughly by 1.5oC.
As rain becomes less predictable, farming grows increasingly dependent on irrigation. This creates a dangerous feedback loop, accelerating water depletion and deepening ecological breakdown across the region.
Much of the Cerrado’s carbon lies underground, locked in roots that can reach over 15 metres deep. This “inverted forest” helps plants endure long dry seasons while quietly replenishing aquifers.
When native vegetation is cleared, that long-stored carbon is released. Landscapes that once absorbed emissions are transformed into sources of greenhouse gases, intensifying the climate pressures already bearing down on the region.
Ecological breakdown
The Cerrado plays a central role in Brazil’s water system. It gives rise to eight river basins and sits above three immense aquifers holding vast freshwater reserves. Rising demand from industrial farming, hydropower and expanding cities is placing these systems under relentless stress.
Large-scale water extraction, combined with widespread agrochemical use, is contaminating soils and waterways while draining underground reserves. Rivers are shrinking, ecosystems are destabilising and biodiversity is declining as water systems lose their resilience.
Hydropower development has accelerated the damage. Dams fragment rivers, disrupt natural flows and blocks fish migration routes that both wildlife and local communities rely on. Over time, these changes are fundamentally reshaping entire river systems.
The review also documents extensive fire-driven degradation that often goes uncounted in official deforestation figures. Natural fires in the Cerrado are rare, usually sparked by lightening, yet an estimated 99 per cent of fires in Brazil are caused by human activity linked to land clearing and agricultural expansion.
Between 1985 and 2022, around 40 per cent of the Cerrado burned at least once. Nearly two-thirds of that area burned repeatedly, killing fire-sensitive species and encouraging invasive grasses that trap landscapes in cycles of degradation.
The Ecodomain supports around 13,000 plant species, more than 3,200 vertebrates and tens of thousands of invertebrates. Roughly a third of its plant life is endemic, found nowhere else on Earth.
Yet only a small share of the Cerrado is strictly protected. Many threatened species, particularly plants and insects, remain poorly assessed and politically overlooked. Ecosystems with lower tree cover, such as grasslands, continue to be undervalued despite their immense ecological importance.
It’s not only a matter of protecting threatened species. Around 80 Indigenous peoples live on more than 200 recognised territories across the Cerrado, many safeguarding the region’s last stretches of intact vegetation.
For generations, these communities have cared for the land, guiding rivers, protecting wildlife, and keeping landscapes resilient. Many territories remain only partially recognised under the law, leaving both people and ecosystems exposed to the expanding pressures of agriculture and deforestation.
Rodolfo Salm, ecologist, activist, lecturer at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), and one of the authors of the review, says today’s legal gaps are rooted in a long history of dispossession, now reinforced by new laws:
For much of the Cerrado’s history, Indigenous peoples were progressively expelled from their territories, first by cattle ranching, later by large-scale grain production. This process accelerated with the move of Brazil’s capital to Brasília and deepened under the military dictatorship of the 1960s and 70s.
Today, the recently approved Temporal Framework Law (Marco Temporal), which restricts the right to legal recognition of an Indigenous territory to those areas that were effectively occupied by Indigenous peoples at the time of the 1988 Constitution, combined with complex legal and bureaucratic barriers, has made the recognition of new Indigenous lands in the Cerrado almost impossible.
This is a severe blow to biodiversity, because Indigenous territories are among the most effective and reliable areas for ecosystem protection.
The UK’s stake in the Cerrado
Many people in the UK would be surprised to learn how closely their diets are tied to this distant landscape.
Britain imports millions of tonnes of soy each year, most of it used as animal feed. Around 90% goes to livestock, particularly poultry and pigs, linking the destruction of the Cerrado directly to the meat supply chain.
We’re deeply dependent on the rest of the world, importing around 40 to 50 per cent of our food. And much of this from regions that are hammered themselves by the climatic impacts that we’ve been talking about, said Professor Paul Behrens at the National Emergency Briefing in London last November.
Investigations by NGO Mighty Earth show that major global traders supplying the UK and European markets continue to source soy from areas linked to the Cerrado destruction, despite repeated public commitments to sustainability.
Mighty Earth has also warned that weak UK due-diligence rules risk turning Britain into a dumping ground for deforestation-linked soy and beef, as companies divert high-risk supply away from more tightly regulated markets.
Despite government pledges, UK imports of soy and beef continue to drive the Cerrado destruction through animal feed supply chains.
Philip Fearnside, research professor at Brazil’s National Institute for Research in Amazonia (INPA), and one of the authors of the review, explains why voluntary pledges and sustainability codes have fallen short, highlighting the overlooked indirect impacts of commodity production:
Most soy expansion in the Amazon and the Cerrado occurs not through direct forest clearing, but by converting existing cattle pastures into soy plantations. This transformation is usually the result of ranchers selling their land to soy planters, rather than switching to soy farming themselves.
Because land suitable for soy commands high prices, ranchers often use the proceeds to purchase much larger, cheaper tracts of rainforest deeper in the Amazon, indirectly driving further deforestation. These indirect impacts have largely escaped all existing monitoring and certification schemes.
The UK can establish legally binding rules for companies supplying commodities like soy, requiring them to account for both direct and indirect environmental impacts. By tracking these combined effects, the UK could avoid sourcing soy linked to widespread deforestation in both the Cerrado and the Amazon.
The UK Forest Risk Commodity Regulation (UKFRC) under the Environment Act 2021 has yet to come into force. And because the law only targets illegal clearing, vast areas of land that have been legally converted, but are still wiping out unique habitats, remain unprotected.
Much of this damage remains hidden from view. The soy required for animal feed is a “ghost footprint”, invisible in labels, but very real in climate and ecological terms.
Pereira says the drivers of the Cerrado destruction are well known and largely tolerated:
The rapid destruction of the Cerrado is driven primarily by the expansion of agribusiness, especially soy and livestock farming, enabled by permissive land-use policies and deficient enforcement.
Unlike the Amazon, most deforestation in the Cerrado is still legally permitted, which protects corporations and supply chains from oversight. International accountability has failed because global climate and biodiversity frameworks largely neglect grasslands and savannas, treating them as disposable landscapes rather than critical ecosystems.
A warning, and a choice
According to the Nature Conservation review, the Cerrado is being pushed towards collapse.
Fearnside warns that continued destruction of the Cerrado isn’t just a regional crisis but a global risk, accelerating climate breakdown while undermining water systems, biodiversity and the communities that depend on them:
The loss of the Cerrado contributes directly to global warming and to the breakdown of water recycling, just as Amazon deforestation does. Together, these processes destroy biodiversity and the human societies that depend on native vegetation.
Current practices are pushing the global climate toward tipping points that, if crossed, would be devastating not only for Brazil, but for the world. Avoiding this outcome requires more than protecting forests alone: it means ending the clearing of the Cerrado and the Amazon and rapidly ending the use of fossil fuels.
For the UK, the Cerrado isn’t a distant problem. Its fate connects directly to our imports, diets, and daily choices. Climate responsibility starts long before the shoreline, in our kitchens, on our plates, and through the choices we make every day.
Featured image: Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer (left) meeting with the President of Brazil Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva for a bilateral meeting in New York ahead of addressing the United Nations General Assembly. Alamy/Leon Neal
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