In recent years, the area affected by forest degradation in the Brazilian Amazon has frequently been higher than deforestation. From August 2006 to July 2019, the degraded area totalled 194,058 km², representing almost two times the 99,630 km² deforested in the same period. The impacts of degradation include biodiversity loss and changes in the carbon stocks, affecting the CO₂ balance and future climate changes. This paper aims to explore socio-economic and environmental factors that influence forest degradation, project future scenarios, and assess the impact on the regional carbon balance, combining forest degradation and deforestation-related processes (clear-cut deforestation and secondary vegetation dynamics). We show that, while net CO₂ emissions from 2020 to 2050 are 0.74 Gt CO₂ in the Sustainable scenario, this value reached 22.63 Gt CO₂ in the Fragmentation scenario, an increasingly plausible scenario given the recent trends in the region.