Although regarded as “unexpected,” the collapse of the Fundão tailings dam in 2015 resulted from the synergistic interplay between the capitalist logic of environmental resource exploitation and environmental degradation in the Doce River Basin (DRB). Our objective was to assess whether this disaster altered land-use dynamics in the DRB. To achieve this, we characterized land-use transitions by comparing changes over three years before (2012–2015) and after (2016–2019) the disaster. We differentiated municipalities adjoining the affected rivers from the remaining municipalities. We evaluated anthropogenic and natural driving forces as explanatory variables: farmland to natural vegetation (land abandonment) or natural vegetation to farmland (farmland expansion). We detected two main driving forces of land abandonment, precipitation and temperature, both before and after the dam collapse. Still, there was a shift between periods: before the dam collapse, the drivers of land abandonment differed between municipalities adjoining and those not adjoining the affected rivers. After the disaster, all municipalities shared the same drivers for land abandonment. For farmland expansion, we detected five drivers for the period before (temperature, precipitation, natural vegetation area, roads, and municipality area) and five drivers after (urban area, slope, natural vegetation area, roads, and municipality area) the dam collapse. Thus, we detected a change in the drivers but no distinction between municipalities adjoining and not adjoining the affected rivers. Our results evidenced a direct effect of the disaster on land abandonment but not farmland expansion, where the observed temporal changes may be related to temporal changes independent of the disaster. Our work shows that the collapse of the Fundão mining dam changed the drivers of “land abandonment,” which may be due to anthropic avoidance of using Doce River’s water for farmland or to a change in socio-economic drivers, such as those related to the monthly financial compensation of affected farmers.