SAO PAULO — One of the world’s most respected climate advocates, Brazil’s Environment Minister Marina Silva, announced Wednesday that she will depart her cabinet post in President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s administration to compete in Brazil’s upcoming national congressional election this fall.
Per Brazil’s strict election regulations, any cabinet official seeking elected office must resign from their government position no later than six months before the October 4 vote, clearing the way for her transition. João Paulo Ribeiro Capobianco, a career environmentalist who has served as executive secretary of the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change, will step into the role to succeed Silva.
In a public statement shared to her Instagram account, Silva framed her departure as the completion of a core mandate: “I fulfilled the tasks assigned to me, which involved rebuilding and moving forward Brazil’s environmental policy following years of decline.” A veteran legislator who first won a congressional seat in 1994 and was re-elected most recently in 2022, Silva added that she will return to her legislative mandate and actively campaign for Lula’s re-election bid this year.
This departure marks the end of Silva’s second tenure leading Brazil’s environmental policy under Lula, and for the second time in her career, she leaves behind a historic drop in Amazon deforestation. When she retook the ministerial post in 2023, the country was grappling with a near-doubling of forest loss that occurred during the four-year administration of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who held office from 2019 to 2022. After taking office, Silva pledged to eliminate all illegal deforestation in Brazil by 2030, and data from her tenure shows policies rolled out under her leadership have already cut Amazon forest loss by more than 50%.
Marcio Astrini, executive director of the Climate Observatory, a leading coalition of Brazilian environmental nonprofits, called Silva’s progress transformative. “If nothing exceptionally negative happens, we should have, if not the lowest, one of the lowest deforestation rates in the Amazon’s recorded history,” Astrini said. He added that Silva’s administration also delivered robust protections for the Cerrado savanna biome and implemented sustained, effective policies to curb the severe forest fires that ravaged the region in 2023 and 2024 amid extreme drought conditions.
Bolsonaro, who is currently serving a 27-year prison sentence for his role in the 2022 coup attempt, centered his environmental policy on advancing agribusiness interests that opposed the creation of protected Indigenous and conservation territories and pushed for the legalization of illegally grabbed public forest land. His administration froze all new designated protected areas, gutted the budget and authority of federal environmental enforcement agencies, and transferred oversight of forest management to the agriculture ministry, which is historically aligned with agribusiness. By the year ending July 2021, Amazon deforestation under Bolsonaro hit a 15-year peak, with only a minor slowdown in destruction recorded in the following 12 months.
Astrini noted that Silva moved quickly to reverse these changes upon her return to office: she reorganized the structure of the Environment Ministry and federal protection agencies, and restructured the Amazon Fund — the world’s largest dedicated rainforest conservation initiative, which she originally helped design during her first tenure as minister. The restructured fund secured record new international contributions, funding expanded on-the-ground enforcement operations that had been halted under Bolsonaro.
“The environmental sector started working again in Brazil,” Astrini said. “That was the first major achievement: She put the house in order.”
Silva was also the key driving force behind Brazil’s successful bid to host the 2025 UN Climate Change Conference (COP30) in the Amazon city of Belém, and remains the most authoritative voice on Brazil’s national climate agenda. Still, Astrini acknowledged that even with Silva’s leadership, the Lula administration has faced major pushback on environmental protection from congressional factions. Last year, lawmakers passed a bill to streamline environmental licensing for large strategic infrastructure projects, cutting a process that previously took six to seven years and required multiple layers of approval down to just 12 months. Lula has also pushed forward with plans to approve exploratory offshore oil drilling at the mouth of the Amazon River, an ecologically critical region that scientists warn is highly vulnerable to oil spill damage. Silva was publicly critical of both measures, but lacked the political capital to block them.
Born in the Amazon region and a former rubber tapper in her youth, Silva has a decades-long track record of environmental leadership. During her first tenure as environment minister under Lula’s initial two presidential terms from 2003 to 2008, she oversaw the creation of dozens of new protected conservation areas, built the country’s world-leading satellite deforestation monitoring system, and launched large-scale crackdowns on illegal environmental crime. She also helped design and launch the original Amazon Fund during that first term.
Silva resigned from her first ministerial post in 2008 after high-profile clashes with Lula, who was shifting policy to court agribusiness interests during his second term. The two political figures reconciled years later, and Silva threw her support behind Lula’s successful 2022 election campaign that ousted Bolsonaro, clearing the way for her return to the environment ministry.
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