The fires that could reshape the Amazon
A firefighter battling flames in the Brasilia National Forest of Brazil on Sept. 4. Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters
Large parts of Brazil, a country that holds over a tenth of the world’s fresh water, are on fire.
They include vast areas of the Amazon rainforest and the Pantanal, the world’s largest wetlands, as well as the Cerrado grasslands and the Atlantic forests along the country’s eastern coast.
The number of fires in the country has more than doubled compared with last year, burning an area the size of Costa Rica in August alone.
Smoke covered large parts of South America this month and blackened the skies of some of the region’s biggest cities, including Buenos Aires; São Paulo, Brazil; and La Paz, Bolivia. As if that weren’t dystopian enough, black rain from the soot produced by the fires has fallen over cities in several states in Brazil in the past few days.
In much of Brazil, fire season usually peaks this time of the year, as farmers set fire to pasture and burn recently deforested plots to clear them of unwanted vegetation. But blazes have unleashed a lot more destruction this year.
Though experts say many of the fires were very likely started by humans, the abundance of dry vegetation fueled immense blazes that grew out of control in extraordinary ways.
Almost half of the fires in the Amazon burned pristine forests, according to data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. That is far from typical. It means fighting deforestation in the Amazon is no longer enough to stop fires.
This matters because it shows that the fire-control practices in some of the world’s most biodiverse places are not working. And that threatens myriad forms of life, including us. The collapse of the Amazon rainforest could release the equivalent of as much as 20 years’ worth of global carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
Deforestation and fires
The drought-depleted Madeira River, a tributary of the Amazon, in Humaita, Amazonas State, on Sept. 7. Edmar Barros/Associated Press
Deforestation is still a big problem in South America. The Cerrado grasslands, in the east of Brazil, continue to lose much of their tree cover as farmers plant soy crops that can cover areas as big as whole cities. And, while deforestation in the Amazon rainforest has slowed, it is still happening at a faster pace than the forest’s recovery rate.
Stopping deforestation should still be the priority, scientists told me. But, as the planet warms, other threats are growing.
A study from 2018 showed that, when there is drought in the Amazon, fires can increase even when deforestation goes down. That’s because drier vegetation in the form of standing trees continues to fuel the blazes.
“If fires are a direct consequence of deforestation, then a policy to fight deforestation should also be effective against fires,” said Luiz Aragão, a scientist at the space research institute and one of the authors of the study. “And what we are seeing is that it isn’t.”