After enduring its worst drought on record in 2024, Brazil closed the year with another alarming milestone: between January and December, 30.86m hectares of wilderness burned – an area larger than Italy.
The figure published in a new report is 79% higher than in 2023 and the largest recorded by Fire Monitor since its launch in 2019 by MapBiomas, an initiative by NGOs, universities and technology companies that monitors Brazil’s biomes.
The data could pose an embarrassment as Brazil prepares to host COP30 in Belém, the capital of the Amazonian state of Pará, in November.
Not only was the state the hardest hit by the fires, accounting for 24% of the total burned area, but the Amazon was also the most affected of Brazil’s six biomes, at 58%. The area scorched in the Amazon in 2024 exceeds the total burned across the country in 2023.
“It was an absurd increase,” said Ane Alencar, coordinator of MapBiomas, adding that, for the first time, forest areas were the most affected, surpassing grasslands and pastures. “Once a forest is hit by fire, it takes years and years to recover … If there’s another drought and that forest isn’t protected, it will burn again,” she said.
The researchers believe severe drought between 2023 and 2024 – the worst since the government began keeping records in 1950 – exacerbated by El Niño was a decisive factor in the wildfire surge.
“But that’s just one part of the equation. The other involves human activity,” said Alencar, pointing primarily to the agricultural sector, which often uses fire to clear pastures, as well as deforestation, which has been drastically reduced under the president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s third term, but still hasn’t been eradicated.
“There were also cases where fires simply started in the middle of a forest, which suggests possible criminal activity,” the researcher said.
At the fires’ peak in September, there were suspicions that the blazes might have been part of a criminal backlash against federal efforts to crack down on deforestation and illegal mining. The Federal Police opened 119 investigations into suspected arson in 2024 alone, an increase from the average of 70 in previous years.
Alencar fears that 2025 could see a similar scenario. “We would need a very strong rainy season to truly replenish the soil, and that hasn’t happened yet,” she said.
Despite the grim statistics, she says that the blame cannot fall on Lula’s administration. “If we had seen last year the level of deforestation we had in 2022 [when the climate change denier Jair Bolsonaro was in charge], combined with the climatic conditions of 2024, then it would have been the worst-case scenario,” she said.
“One clear takeaway is that forest conservation goes far beyond fighting deforestation. We also need to focus on combating climate change,” said Alencar.
Source: theguardian.com
