As the 2026 El Niño intensifies across the Amazon, new research highlights the urgent need to better protect the region’s remaining forests from disturbances.

While measures to avoid deforestation or restore cleared land dominate many conservation strategies, approaches to protect existing forests from disturbances, including selective logging and wildfires, can often provide the biggest “bang for your buck”, a new study, published today in Science shows.

The findings are from an international team of researchers from the UK, Brazil, Sweden and Australia, led by scientists at Lancaster University. The group undertook the first systematic comparison study of its kind by contrasting different ways to either protect existing forests or restore them on agricultural land.

The analysis covered more than three million hectares in the regions of Santarém and Paragominas, in the Brazilian state of Pará, between 2010 and 2020. It combined high-resolution satellite imagery with field data from 381 survey transects across 38 catchments and 499 rural properties, as well as models mapping 160 bird species and 426 tree species.

Using observed land-use changes, the researchers used counterfactual scenarios to assess how each strategy would have affected biodiversity and carbon stocks compared with the changes that actually occurred. The team also estimated the costs associated with each intervention, allowing the benefits delivered for the resources invested to be compared within a common framework.

“These findings highlight the need to put in place policies and resources to prevent and tackle the wildfires that disturb and degrade tropical forests,” said Professor Jos Barlow, of Lancaster University and senior author of the study.

“This is all the more urgent in this El Niño year. These events, combined with climate change, result in longer, hotter and more intense dry seasons across the Amazon’s ‘arc of deforestation’, greatly increasing the extent and severity of forest fires.”

Avoiding forest disturbances delivered particularly significant results. It generated the greatest benefits for forest biodiversity and was almost as important as preventing deforestation for protecting carbon stocks.

“While no one strategy is a silver bullet, our results provide clear evidence that we should begin by prioritising the forests we have left,” said Dr Leonardo Miranda, of Lancaster University and lead author of the study. “And protection must go beyond avoiding deforestation. Avoiding forest disturbances from wildfires or logging delivered the greatest benefits for forest biodiversity.”

Restoration delivered important benefits, particularly in properties where most of the original forest had already been lost. Across the study area as a whole, however, restoration on agricultural land was less effective when implemented on its own and was also the most expensive strategy. The results show that conservation resources should be directed according to local landscape conditions.

No single intervention was sufficient to reverse biodiversity and carbon losses across the entire study area.

“Net-gains in biodiversity and carbon storage were only achieved when both avoidance interventions were implemented. However, combining all three interventions delivered even greater gains,” said Dr Miranda. “Combined interventions will be even more important as climate change progresses, especially as forest restoration can be particularly vulnerable to wildfires.”

The findings are particularly timely given the growing emphasis on forest restoration in global commitments and Brazilian federal and state policies.

“Restoration is essential where forests have been lost across large areas. But our study shows that investing in new forests makes little sense if, at the same time, we fail to protect existing forests,” said the co-author Dr. Joice Ferreira, senior researcher at Embrapa and the principal investigator of the ‘Capoeira’ research programme on restoration. “Otherwise, we are pouring money into a leaky pot – restoring forests in one place while others are being degraded and lost. What we urgently need to do is integrate these policy agendas, ensuring that forest restoration goes hand in hand with protection of the forests we still have.”

Although focused on two Amazonian regions the researchers say that these findings are likely applicable to tropical deforestation frontiers around the world, and have relevance for policies beyond the tropics.

“There is a need for the companies and markets that benefit from nationally and globally traded commodities like soy and beef to take responsibility not only for deforestation, but also the degradation of remaining forests that is inextricably linked to these production systems,” said Dr. Toby Gardner, co-author and Senior Research Fellow at Stockholm Environment Institute and co-founder of the supply chain sustainability initiative Trase.

The findings are detailed in the paper Protecting tropical forests is more cost-effective for biodiversity and climate than restoration published in Science on September 17, 2026.

The research was convened by the Sustainable Amazon Network (Rede Amazonia Sustentavel) and funded by sources including UK’s Global Centre on Biodiversity for Climate and Brazil’s National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).