Due to better weather conditions and increased preventive efforts by Brazil’s government, the 2025 Amazon fire season is currently milder than those experienced in recent years. But that doesn’t mean the Amazon is safe. Once the flames die down, the destruction continues. Quieter and slower, but just as deadly. Land grabbing, pasture expansion, and toxic smoke threaten both forests and frontline communities.

Because the Amazon isn’t just being burned. It’s being sold, cleared, fenced, and fed into the global industrial agriculture machine. And at the centre of that machine is Big Ag.

What happens after a fire? Pastures. Cattle. Cash.

In 2024, according to MapBiomas, the Amazon recorded its largest burned area in 40 years, with 15.6 million hectares affected, 117% above average. That figure shocked the world. However, even when fire activity slows, land-grabbing and deforestation persist, driven by farms that feed into an industrial system of meat. Pasture expansion for cattle remains the leading driver of deforestation in the Amazon. 

One of the industry’s biggest players, the meat giant JBS, has been repeatedly linked to deforestation across its massive supply chain. Investigations have found that JBS is connected to over 1.5 million hectares of deforestation in its indirect cattle supply chain. Furthermore, JBS admitted to purchasing 8,785 head of cattle from three ranches owned by Chaules Volban Pozzebon, following a complaint by Greenpeace Brasil, Repórter Brasil, and Unearthed. The rancher was arrested and initially sentenced to 99 years in prison for multiple crimes, including illegal logging, and is considered the country’s most prolific deforester. He was also convicted of using labour analogous to slavery on one of his properties. The purchases were registered as coming from another farm, also owned by Pozzebon, which had been cleared according to socio-environmental criteria. Meanwhile, analysis from Mapbiomas shows that in 2024, 55% of the burnings in the Amazon started in pasturelands, further evidence that fire is a tool, not an accident.

This is not restoration. It’s extraction.

Health impacts and human costs: IPLCs on the frontlines

What’s often left out of headlines is the devastating impact on human health and livelihoods, especially for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs).

In 2024, smoke from record wildfires blanketed cities across the Brazilian Amazon, turning the air toxic. In Porto Velho, the haze was so thick that schools were forced to close and flights were grounded. Local clinics were soon overwhelmed with patients struggling to breathe, reporting respiratory distress, migraines, and eye irritation, according to the Guardian. 

For IPLCs, these impacts stack onto existing crises: fragile health services, scarce clean water, and the destruction of forest medicines and crops. The haze is more than an inconvenience, it’s a public health emergency that strips people of their right to clean air and undermines entire ways of life.

Yet despite all this, IPLCs remain the backbone of forest defense, standing up to fires and deforestation with little outside support.

This isn’t post-crisis, it’s a slow-motion emergency

When the world’s attention moves on after a provoked fire season, extractive industries move in. The system is designed to appear “normal” while quietly consuming the forest hectare by hectare. Just because the sky is clear doesn’t mean the Amazon is safe. The destruction continues. The resistance grows!

And your voice is needed more than ever.

Have your say and help us spread the message!

This destruction doesn’t need flames to keep spreading. As global leaders prepare for COP30 happening in the heart of the forest in the Brazilian state of Belém in November 2025, the Amazon must be front and centre. Not just as a carbon sink, but as a living, breathing territory under assault.

Leaders attending COP30 need to commit to a five-year “Action Plan for Implementation” (API4Forests) – a concrete decision to halt and reverse deforestation and forest degradation by 2030.

You can help pressure decision-makers by sending a message demanding:

• An end to land grabs and industrial meat expansion into ecosystems like the Amazon.
• Accountability for companies like JBS.
• Full protection for Indigenous rights and territories.
• Real funding for community-led solutions and forest defenders.

Send your message to world leaders before COP30. We will bring them to the world leaders and resist with those living with what comes after the fire.

Alessandro Saccoccio is the Respect the Amazon Project Lead at Greenpeace International.

From a scorched mountain range in Spain to a giant polar bear in South Korea, here are a selection of images from Greenpeace photographers around the world this week.

Spain – A 16-day heatwave has exacerbated the fires that have ravaged Spain, making this summer one of the worst on record.

This is the toll of the flames in recent weeks, which have destroyed almost 400,000 hectares. Greenpeace Spain, with the help of photographer Pedro Armestre, has documented the extent of the destruction in the Communities of Galicia and Castile and León from the air, even reaching areas that have not been previously documented.

Belgium – Amazonia travelling letters at Place du Luxembourg in front of the European Parliament in Brussels. Greenpeace bring the Amazon to the heart of Europe through a powerful street-level action: giant AMAZONIA letters touring major cities. Through emotional messages, video projections, and Indigenous voices, the action calls for urgent climate justice and forest protection ahead of the historic COP30 in Belém.

South Korea – Greenpeace Seoul hosted the second edition of the pop-up campaign ‘WEarth: The Voice of Earth’ at Hyundai Department Store in Bucheon. Unlike the first event in June, which took place in central Seoul, this popup targeted department store visitors and families, creating an approachable way for new audiences to connect with Greenpeace. Participants joined activities such as the ‘Yeolbat-gom’ (angry polar bear) photo zone, recording voices for the Earth, making eco-friendly moss planters with recycled coffee grounds, and a children’s climate talk by science communicator Dr. Jungmo Lee.

Philippines – Rep. Javi Benitez delivers a powerful speech in Congress, outlining the risks of climate change and the impacts on local communities of extreme weather events in the region, ahead of the re-filing of the Climate Accountability Bill.

South Africa – Greenpeace activists and communities living in some of South Africa’s most polluted regions staged a powerful peaceful protest outside the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE) in Pretoria to denounce South Africa’s deadly air pollution crisis and demand urgent governmental action.

Greenpeace has been a pioneer of photo activism for more than 50 years, and remains committed to bearing witness and exposing environmental injustice through the images we capture.

To see more Greenpeace photos and videos, please visit our Media Library.

Every day, every hour, you click on news that is stressful, overwhelming, and disheartening. Even as one remains committed to witnessing what is happening the world over, it seems equally important to feel powerful and hopeful in the face of so much bad news.

That collective sense of doom can be verified with data when market research company IPSOS releases its What Worries the World survey, revealing where global anxieties lie. In the recent August 2025 survey report, the top five concerns across 30 countries were crime & violence, inflation, poverty and social inequality, unemployment, and corruption. 

These data points matter, of course. But perhaps the surveys we often don’t find are the ones asking the question “What Gives the World Hope?”. It’s a valid and crucial question. In times of such extremes, hope remains as one of the important possibilities for change, a declaration that all is not lost.

I, like many others I assert, derive hope from taking action and witnessing the action of others. Let me walk you through a few examples of how local communities are turning worry into hope in action.

Local-led solutions: building grounds for hope

When inflation squeezes budgets and the cost of living makes it hard to put food on the table, farmers’ cooperatives in Morocco and Egypt step in, empowered to produce food in their communities in sustainable, equitable, and inclusive ways.

As small-scale farmers worked together to form a regional social and cooperative economic entity,  they are upscaling a women-led chili-pepper production into a regional cooperation and movement that hoped to transform the policies in the countries they operate. 

In places where housing seems like a privilege rather than a basic need, housing cooperatives, such as Kampung Akuarium in North Jakarta, provide a solution.  The residents, who were once victims of forced eviction in 2016, rebuilt their lives and were allowed to return. The “kampung” (neighborhood) built “kampung susun” (stacked vertical kampung) an appropriate design that fits their needs and customs.

Aside from provisioning shelter needs, the neighbourhood cooperative ventured into small-scale businesses, such as catering, laundry, and renting out shops. These gave additional income that the neighbourhood was able to distribute to the community in support of other basic needs such as electricity, water, and building maintenance. The efficacy of the alternative system led to replication in several urban poor communities across Jakarta and even inspired Rujak Center for Urban Studies to apply it to its mid-rise housing in Jakarta.

When economic growth fails to provide basic services for the people, a traditional system of money management in Africa, known in many names such as “njangi”, “tontine”,  “stokvel”, “pari”, “sousou”, “ajoh”, and “family lottery”, serves as a safeguard. 

These community-based systems represent a vast informal economy. They support families through tough times, helping them to put children to school, and offering opportunities to improve people’s lives who are often excluded from formal systems offered by banks and the state.

These grassroots efforts are not just responses—they are vibrant embodiments of hope in action are reshaping the economy—tackling housing, food, and fairness head-on, while giving policymakers a blueprint for real change. 

Explore our map (full screen) to discover how local-led solutions are making a global impact. 

Your turn: What brings you hope?

We at Greenpeace, invite you to look around you, reflect and share with us: what brings you hope in the world right now? Is it a youth-led enterprise initiative? A collective transforming how cities and communities become more resilient to the climate crisis? Is it a labor union advocating for a fair share of profit and a just working environment? A solidarity economy model creating equitable opportunity?

We believe a thriving economy and a healthy planet can go hand in hand together. Now, we’d love to hear from you: what’s a win-win idea for the planet and the economy? Share your hopeful thoughts through the form below.

Rhea Jane Mallari is a Wellbeing Economy Project Lead at Greenpeace International