Area Of Brazilian Amazon Fires In August At Highest Level For Month Since 2010 As Fire Season Starts
Towns in the Brazilian states of Amazonas and Pará have experienced a recent bout of skies overcast with thick clouds of smoke, the result of fires raging in the Amazon Rainforest. The forest fires peaked in the last few weeks after hitting a new historical record. For the month of August, there were 33,116 fires in the Amazon, according to INPE, Brazil’s national space research institute. That’s the highest number for the month since 2010, with the largest concentration of burning in the southern region of the biome.
On Aug. 22 alone, as President Jair Bolsonaro was declaring in a television interview with the Globo network that Brazil’s reputation as a forest destroyer was unwarranted, more than 3,300 fire alerts were recorded in 24 hours, the worst single-day tally in 15 years. It was three times as many as during the infamous “Day of Fire” on Aug. 10, 2019, which became a milestone in the history of the destruction of the rainforest. On that occasion, farmers in Pará colluded to start illegal fires in several spots across the region.
Record-breaking fires have become business as usual in recent years, particularly under Bolsonaro, who took office at the start of 2019. His administration has been marked by decade-high spikes in deforestation rates and fires in the Amazon. In June this year, for example, the Brazilian Amazon saw the highest number of fires for the month since 2007, with 2,562 major fires detected — an increase of 11% over June 2021. There were no new records broken in July, though the 5,373 fires reported were still up by 9% from July 2021. A similar trend has played out in Brazil’s other biomes. Since May 2022, fires have raged in the Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland, including inside Pantanal do Rio Negro State Park, a protected reserve rich in biodiversity. These fires followed devastating blazes in 2020 and 2021, which consumed vast parts of the biome and threatened a wealth of wildlife.
Fire and deforestation monitoring near the Manicoré River in the Brazilian Amazon. INPE recorded 33,116 fire alerts in the Amazon via satellite in August, making it the worst August since 2010, when there were 45,018 fire alerts recorded. Image © Christian Braga/Greenpeace.
Historically, the period from August to October sees a decline in rainfall and is considered the fire season in the Amazon. Unlike in the temperate forests of the U.S. West and other high-latitude forests, fire isn’t a natural phenomenon in the Amazon. Naturally occurring fires here are exceedingly rare, occurring once every 500 years or more, according to the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM). Instead, in the world’s largest rainforest, the burning is started mainly by illegal farmers, ranchers, land grabbers and speculators clearing the land and torching trees.
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https://news.mongabay.com/2022/09/blazing-start-to-amazons-fire-season-as-burning-hits-august-record/
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