Legal Amazon

An administrative region of Brazil covering nine states and about 59 percent of the country, which is not the same thing as the Amazon rainforest.

The Legal Amazon is a legal and statistical boundary rather than an ecological one. Brazil's national statistics institute defines it as the area of operation of SUDAM, the agency for Amazon development, delimited in accordance with Article 2 of Complementary Law number 124 of 2007. It was created to mark out where a development policy applies, not to trace where a forest grows.

It is very large. The region takes in 773 municipalities across nine states: Rondonia, Acre, Amazonas, Roraima, Para, Amapa, Tocantins, Mato Grosso and the part of Maranhao west of the 44th meridian. Together that is just over 5 million square kilometres, close to 59 percent of Brazil's territory.

Because it was drawn for administration, it includes substantial areas that are not rainforest at all, notably cerrado savanna in its southern and eastern reaches. This is why the distinction matters when reading a number. Deforestation figures from the PRODES system are reported for the Legal Amazon, so a reader who takes them as measuring the rainforest biome alone is reading a slightly different area than the one being measured. The figures are not wrong; they are answering a precisely defined question about a defined region.

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