RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil: Nearly 3,000 wildfires have been recorded in Brazil’s Amazon this month, the most in February since records began in 1999, and experts say climate change is increasingly to blame.
Brazil’s space institute INPE announced on Wednesday that its satellites have detected 2,940 fires so far this month. This is a 67 percent increase from the record 1,761 cases recorded in February 2007 and four times the number of cases in the same month last year.
The climate factor certainly plays a fundamental role in this anomaly, scientific director of the IPAM Amazonia research institute, Ane Alencar, told media.
The northern part of the rainforest was hit the hardest, especially Roraima state, home to the Yanomami indigenous reserve.
A drought ravaged the Brazilian Amazon between June and November last year, causing massive fires, reducing or eliminating key water sources, wreaking havoc on wildlife and affecting millions of people.
A study last month by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) said climate change was the main driver of the “exceptional drought” in the world’s largest rainforest.
WWA is a scientific project that aims to quantify how climate change affects the severity and probability of certain extreme weather events.
Alencar said this environmental “stress” creates “all the conditions necessary for any fire to become a large fire” and that some fires are caused by deforestation for agriculture.
According to figures released last month, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon halved in 2023, as the government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva strengthened its environmental police.
Satellite monitoring showed that 5,152 square kilometers of forest were destroyed in Brazil’s rainforest region in 2023, a 50 percent decrease from 2022.
That still means Brazil has lost 29 times the world’s largest rainforest, where carbon-sucking trees play a key role in curbing climate change.
After defeating far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in a divisive 2022 election, veteran leftist Lula returned to office on January 1, 2023, declaring that “Brazil is back” as a partner in the fight against climate change. » He swore.
He also promised to end illegal deforestation in Brazil by 2030.
