Brazil

Brazil enters the second quarter of the twenty-first century with the strongest tourism numbers in its history. Embratur recorded roughly 9.3 million international arrivals in 2025, a leap of nearly forty percent on the previous year's record and a figure that exceeded the National Tourism Plan target by about thirty percent in a single season. The Travel and Tourism sector now contributes around 7.7 percent of GDP and supports more than eight million jobs, anchored by a rapid surge of Argentine visitors, steady growth from Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, the United States, and a substantial European cohort, and the global attention generated by the BRICS summit in Brasília and COP30 in Belém. Yet the figures that will matter most for Brazilian tourism over the remainder of the century are not on the tourism balance sheet. They are written in the canopy density of the Amazon, in the height of the tide at Recife and Copacabana, in the flow regime of rivers feeding the Pantanal, and in the legal status of the algorithms that increasingly decide where a foreign visitor sleeps and what they pay.

The single largest determinant of Brazil's tourism future is the Amazon. A 2024 synthesis in Nature, drawing on more than two hundred prior studies, concluded that between ten and forty-seven percent of Amazonian forest will be exposed to compounding disturbance from warming, extreme drought, deforestation, and fire by mid-century, with self-reinforcing feedbacks capable of pushing large parts of the system toward degraded open-canopy ecosystems, white-sand savanna, or impoverished secondary forest. The biome has already lost roughly a fifth of its original cover; the operative question for the second half of the century is whether enforcement under reinvigorated federal agencies can hold the line through plausible warming trajectories. The 2023 and 2024 droughts offered an unsubtle preview. The Rio Negro at Manaus fell to its lowest level since records began in 1902, the Madeira reached an all-time low, and the river-tourism backbone serving Manaus, Tefé, Mamirauá, Anavilhanas, and Alter do Chão was effectively suspended for months. The 2024 Pantanal fires consumed about seventeen percent of the biome, and attribution analysis found the fire-weather conditions to be several times more likely and meaningfully more intense because of human-caused warming. Jaguar tourism, one of the most reliable wildlife products in the Americas, is now structurally exposed.

The other physical constraint is the coast. Central projections imply between roughly forty centimetres and a metre of global mean sea-level rise by 2100, with low-likelihood high-impact tails reaching higher still. The exposure for Brazilian tourism is unusually severe because the Atlantic seaboard carries the bulk of arrivals. Recife is already losing beach at a measurable rate each year along Boa Viagem; Maceió, Fortaleza, Salvador's lower city, Rio's Copacabana–Ipanema–Barra strip, and the Amazon delta around Belém and Marajó all face cumulative loss of iconic product. The May 2024 floods in Rio Grande do Sul made the broader problem concrete. More than four hundred millimetres of rain fell in ten days, Lake Guaíba rose to nearly five and a half metres, Porto Alegre's twentieth-century flood wall failed well below its design rating, and reconstruction costs ran into the tens of billions. The event was found to be more than twice as likely and meaningfully more intense than it would have been in a pre-industrial climate.

Against this background, the most legitimate and most durable stewardship model runs through Indigenous Lands, Quilombola territories, and community-based ecotourism. The creation of the Ministério dos Povos Indígenas in January 2023, under Sonia Guajajara, alongside Indigenous leadership at FUNAI, has restored an institutional architecture for demarcation that was systematically dismantled in the prior decade. The Yanomami humanitarian emergency, declared shortly after the change of government, made plain both the depth of state withdrawal and the scale of the work required to expel garimpeiros and reverse mercury contamination. Where this architecture functions, the empirical record on forest cover inside demarcated territories is unambiguous, and the tourism implications follow directly. The Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve, the Anavilhanas archipelago, and Indigenous-led ventures by the Surui, Yawanawá, Ashaninka, Kayapó, Munduruku, and Tikuna already demonstrate that a smaller, higher-yield, consent-anchored model is both feasible and replicable. Quilombola routes in Bahia, Maranhão, and the Vale do Ribeira, formally protected since the 1988 Constitution and increasingly titled by INCRA, are emerging as a parallel cultural-tourism segment of growing depth.

Artificial intelligence sits across this transformation as a genuinely double-edged instrument. The federal Plano Brasileiro de Inteligência Artificial, finalised in 2025, commits significant multi-year investment across infrastructure, Portuguese-language models, public services, industrial innovation, and governance. INPE's PRODES and DETER systems, MapBiomas, and Imazon's SAD deforestation alert have been progressively augmented with machine-learning classifiers trained on Sentinel imagery and used operationally to direct interdictions; deforestation in the Amazon fell sharply under this regime through 2024. Fire prediction with SOS Pantanal's Sigma tool reaching Indigenous and traditional communities, computer-vision reef monitoring at Abrolhos and Fernando de Noronha, dynamic ticketing at saturated sites such as Iguaçu and Lençóis Maranhenses, heritage digital twins of Ouro Preto, Olinda, the Pelourinho, and the Jesuit Missions ruins, and nascent community-led work on Nheengatu, Tupi, Guarani, Kaingang, and Yanomami language corpora all point toward a real and growing AI dividend for sustainable tourism. The same stack, however, has been weaponised. Garimpeiros use commercial drones and satellite-image scraping to evade enforcement; platform-tourism intermediaries route demand toward large branded operators, structurally squeezing the share of revenue that small Indigenous and Quilombola lodges can retain; biometric surveillance during Carnival and mega-events has repeatedly produced false-positive arrests in Black neighbourhoods; and hyperscale data centres under negotiation in the Northeast raise unresolved questions about energy and water demand in a region already on a desertification trajectory. The decisive policy variable is therefore sovereign regulation, anchored by the LGPD data-protection law and the pending PL 2338/2023 AI Bill before the Federal Senate.

By 2100 the most defensible expectation is for a tourism economy that is smaller in volume but higher in value, more inland and more dispersed, more deeply integrated with the bioeconomy, and more visibly governed through Indigenous and Quilombola protocols. Carbon-finance flows under the 2024 carbon-market law and the regulated Sistema Brasileiro de Comércio de Emissões, with full operation phased in toward the end of the decade, provide a plausible scaffolding for blended revenue in standing-forest economies, including jurisdictional REDD+ in Acre, Mato Grosso, and Pará. Domestic tourism, which today accounts for the overwhelming majority of total spend, will shift as the Brazilian population ages and eventually declines from a projected mid-century peak. The Serra Gaúcha, already on a trajectory toward becoming better suited to premium sparkling and red wines as warmer-climate viticulture regions shift poleward, is a structural growth story, provided reconstruction after the 2024 floods is climate-rated rather than merely climate-aware. The Minas Gerais historic circuit of Ouro Preto, Tiradentes, Diamantina, and Congonhas is among the most climate-resilient products in the country and the principal candidate for the inland redistribution of demand. Fernando de Noronha and Abrolhos will likely remain ultra-premium destinations, though shallow-water reef product erodes through the century. The eastern Amazon faces the gravest risks; the western Amazon, around Acre, southern Amazonas, and southern Roraima, is the more probable centre of gravity for surviving rainforest tourism.

None of this is foreordained. A reversal of the current environmental and Indigenous-affairs direction, a failure to pass comprehensive AI legislation, or a deforestation rebound would shift the trajectory toward the more pessimistic scenarios; sustained reductions in deforestation and the COP30 Belém Package commitments translating into actual adaptation finance would shift it toward the more optimistic ones. What remains constant across scenarios is the structural direction. Brazilian tourism in 2100 will be smaller, higher in per-visitor value, more inland, more dispersed, more AI-mediated, and more clearly anchored in the Indigenous and Quilombola territories that by the end of the century will be visibly the country's most valuable tourism asset. Policy built around that direction now, rather than after the tipping points have been crossed, is the work that the present decade actually requires.