The Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), affiliated with the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (CNBB), released this week the 40th edition of the report Conflicts in Rural Brazil. Incidents fell 28 percent, from 2,207 in 2024 to 1,593 in 2025. However, murders of workers and indigenous peoples of the land, waters, and forests doubled, rising from 13 to 26 victims last year.

Most of the murders took place in the Legal Amazon, an area of about 5 million km² that spans nine states and includes parts of three of Brazil’s seven biomes - the Amazon, Cerrado, and Pantanal. There were 16 cases, distributed across the states of Pará (7), Rondônia (7), and Amazonas (2).

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“These figures reveal the advance of a historic project of colonial and capitalist expansion in the Amazon, which continues to target and transform entire peoples and territories into objects of expropriation and extermination,” said Larissa Rodrigues, a member of the Articulation of the CPTs of the Amazon.

She also attributes this situation to the strengthening of a “consortium between land grabbing, organized crime, sectors of the state, and the private sector, which work together to target public lands and protected areas.”

The report shows that farmers are the main perpetrators involved in the murders. Of the 26 cases, they were responsible for 20, either as instigators or as perpetrators.

Other forms of violence that also increased from 2024 to 2025 included arrests (from 71 to 111), humiliation cases (from five to 142), and false imprisonment cases (from one to 105).

“The rise in cases of humiliation and false imprisonment, for example, is due to the arbitrary actions of the Military Police of the state of Rondônia, which in November 2025, as part of Operation Godos, interrupted a public meeting involving about 100 landless families evicted from their camps, as well as officials from the Ministry of Agrarian Development and Family Farming,” said Gustavo Arruda, a researcher at the Dom Tomás Balduino Documentation Center (Cedoc/CPT).

According to the researcher, the increase in arrests is also due to specific actions by state security forces against communities. As an example, he cited the Military Police of the state of Rondônia, which carried out several operations targeting members of the League of Poor Peasants (LCP).

Violence

When all types of conflicts are considered, land-related violence accounts for the largest share (75% or 1,186 cases), followed by labor conflicts (10% or 159), water conflicts (9% or 148), and encampments, occupations, and repossessions (6% or 100).

The main cases of land-related violence were pesticide contamination (127 cases), land invasions (193), and contract killings (113). The main victims were indigenous peoples (258 incidents), followed by squatters (248), quilombolas (244), and landless people (153).

Farmers represent the group responsible for the most violence in land-related cases (515 cases), followed by business owners (180), the federal government (114), and state governments (85).

The main cases of water-related conflict involved rural communities’ resistance to destruction or pollution (1,034), non-compliance with legal procedures (754), reduced access to water (425), and pesticide contamination (129).

Indigenous peoples were the main victims in water conflicts (42 incidents), followed by quilombolas (24), small farmers (20), and riverine communities (17).

The main perpetrators of violence in the water sector were mining companies (34), business owners (29), small-scale miners (26), farmers (23), and hydroelectric power plants (9).

Slave-like labor

The CPT report indicates a 5 percent increase in cases of slave-like labor or conditions analogous to slavery (159 in 2025) and a 23 percent increase in the total number of workers rescued from these conditions (1,991).

The researchers highlight the construction of a power plant in the municipality of Porto Alegre do Norte, in the state of Mato Grosso, where 586 people were rescued. They had been recruited in the North and Northeast regions of the country and were forced to sleep in cramped, overcrowded rooms, received inadequate food, and suffered frequent water and power outages.

The economic sectors with the highest number of rescued workers are power plant construction (586), crop farming (479), sugarcane (253), mining (170), and livestock farming (154). According to CPT, these are sectors that historically show the highest incidence of slave-like labor, with farming and livestock raising as recurring cases.

Socio-environmental platform

On Monday (Apr. 27), the Pastoral Land Commission, in partnership with the Institute for Society, Population, and Nature (ISPN), launched the Socio-Environmental Observatory, a civil society initiative that compiles systematized data from 1980 to 2023 on human rights violations, deforestation, and the expansion of industrial agriculture in Brazil.

According to the organizers, data from different sources will be compiled, cross-referenced, and made available in an interactive digital environment, allowing users to visualize, in a segmented way by state and municipality, the direct relationship between the expansion of commodity production and socio-environmental conflicts in the country.

Extreme rainfall and flooding have become increasingly frequent in Brazilian cities. In this context, the renaturalization of urban rivers is one of the strategies experts advocate to help cities adapt to the impacts of climate change. Restoring and reopening waterways can make these areas more resilient.

Urban landscape architect Cecília Herzog, a member of the Network of Experts in Nature Conservation (RECN), says river restoration is an urgent measure given the current climate scenario.

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According to her, the development model that channeled rivers and covered the soil with asphalt and concrete has exacerbated the effects of rainfall.

“It’s important to remember that water doesn’t disappear. When it rains, it always flows to the lowest points and, at some point, can flood them, especially in flatter or low-lying areas,” Herzog said.

With fewer permeable surfaces, water runs off more quickly, increasing the risk of flooding. In this context, river restoration must be accompanied by a broader revitalization of the urban landscape, including the expansion of green spaces and natural drainage systems. Permeable soil helps slow runoff.

“Water seeps into the soil, is retained for a while, and then continues its course in a more balanced way. In open rivers, with their natural course and riparian vegetation, the impact of rainfall is much smaller,” the landscape architect explained.

Ongoing projects

This understanding is beginning to gain traction in Brazil. In São Paulo, the future Bixiga Municipal Park envisions reopening part of the Bixiga stream, as well as preserving springs and expanding green spaces. The project is the result of more than four decades of mobilization by civil society.

In 2024, the city council approved the allocation of the land for the creation of the public space, and in January this year, the city launched a national public competition to define the design of the future park. The result is expected to be announced in May.

In Rio de Janeiro, a working group coordinated by the Municipal Secretariat for the Environment and Climate is studying the rehabilitation of the Maracanã River through nature-based solutions. Researchers from public and private universities are participating in the initiative.

The proposal includes measures to restore some of the river’s original characteristics and expand the region’s drainage capacity. In March, a partnership was established with the Brazilian Institute of Architects (IAB-RJ) to hold a national public design competition for the renaturalization project. No date has yet been set for the call for proposals, but it is expected to be released later this year.

New standards

Architect and urban planner Juliana Baladelli Ribeiro, project manager at the Boticário Group Foundation, emphasized that renaturalization is part of a new urban development paradigm.

“This concept also includes the implementation of green roofs, rain gardens, vegetated swales, small retention basins, extensive tree planting, and other structures that allow for temporary water retention, facilitate infiltration into the soil, and promote evapotranspiration by plants,” Ribeiro noted.

In addition to reducing flooding, these solutions also help mitigate heat waves, which are becoming increasingly frequent in cities.

Experts emphasize that isolated measures will not be sufficient in the face of increasingly intense extreme weather events. Climate adaptation requires integrated actions tailored to the reality of each territory.

“It will be necessary to create a system for revitalizing the urban landscape. The idea is to restore to the city areas of living soil and native vegetation capable of performing important ecological functions that are currently compromised,” the architect stated.

“This may include sunken areas designed to collect rainwater and various types of green infrastructure, ranging from small-scale interventions to larger projects, depending on the characteristics of each city. Adapting to climate change is always a local challenge that must be addressed in each specific area,” Herzog added.

Brazil’s population is aging and growing at an increasingly slower rate. This is reflected in the 2025 Continuous National Household Sample Survey (PNAD), released this Friday (Apr. 17) by the Brazilian government’s statistics agency IBGE.

Last year, the country's resident population reached 212.7 million, an increase of 0.39 percent compared to 2024. The growth rate has remained below 0.60 percent since 2021. Of the total, 51.2 percent were women and 48.8 percent were men.

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The distribution of the population shows a decline in the proportion of people under 40 years of age, a group that was 6.1 percent smaller in 2025 than in 2012. By contrast, the share of older age groups has increased: those aged 40 to 49 rose from 13 percent to 15 percent, those aged 50 to 59 from 10 percent to 11.8 percent, and those aged 60 or older from 11.3 percent to 16.6 percent.

This shift is also evident in the age pyramid: between 2012 and 2025, the base narrowed and the top widened, with a decline in the population aged 39 and under.

Regional differences remain striking. The North and Northeast regions have the highest shares of young people, accounting for 22.6 percent and 19.1 percent of the population aged 13 and under, respectively, while the Southeast and South have higher proportions of older adults, with both regions reporting 18.1 percent of the population aged 60 or older.

There have also been changes in how the population identifies its skin color or race. The number of people identifying as white has declined in all regions of the country. In 2012, whites accounted for 46.4 percent of the population; by 2025, this share had fallen to 42.6 percent. The percentage of people identifying as black rose from 7.4 percent to 10.4 percent.

The North recorded the largest increase in the black population, rising from 8.7 percent to 12.9 percent. The South saw the strongest growth among people of mixed race, from 16.7 percent to 22 percent, and the sharpest decline in the share of those identifying as white, from 78.8 percent to 72.3 percent.

Rise in single-person households

The percentage of people living alone also increased. In 2025, single-person households accounted for 19.7 percent, up from 12.2 percent in 2012. The nuclear family arrangement - defined as a couple, a mother with children, or a father with children - remains the most common, representing 65.6 percent of households. However, this share has declined from 68.4 percent in 2012.

The survey shows age and gender differences among people living alone. Among men, 56.6 percent are between 30 and 59 years old, while among women, the largest share (56.5 percent) is aged 60 or older.

Regarding housing tenure, the proportion of rented properties rose to 23.8 percent, an increase of 5.4 percentage points since 2016. Meanwhile, the share of fully paid-off, owner-occupied homes fell to 60.2 percent, a decline of 6.6 percentage points over the same period.

There was also a shift in housing types: single-family homes still predominate, but their share fell to 82.7 percent, while apartments increased to 17.1 percent.