In the Amazon, Brazil has made huge gains in the fight against deforesters, but it is increasingly losing ground to another threat: climate change. Amid this year’s prolonged drought, the number of forest fires has reached a 20-year high, official figures show.
From January through June, Brazil recorded 13,489 fires in the Amazon, according to satellite data from the national space agency. That’s 61 percent more fires than in the first half of last year. And the fire season has yet to reach its peak, which usually falls in August or September.
“We’re seeing fires this year that started in pastures or recently cleared rainforest and then spread into surrounding rainforest areas, burning hundreds of square miles,” said NASA researcher Shane Coffield, who studies wildfires in Brazil. “These are huge wildfires.”
The fires have been fueled by a prolonged drought, which scientists say is linked to climate change and has been exacerbated by El Niño. As warming increases, other regions are also seeing more fires. Government figures show that in the first half of this year, the dry Cerrado region and the Pantanal wetlands both saw record numbers of forest fires.
At the same time, deforestation in the Amazon has fallen by 42 percent year-on-year, reflecting President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva about deforestation by farmers and pastoralists.
In the future, worsening fires could wipe out the gains made under Lula. Write in Nature Ecology and EvolutionA group of scientists recently warned that increasingly severe fires “threaten both the real progress in forest protection made by Lula’s government and pose a second threat: weakening public perception of Lula’s commitment to protecting the region.”
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