- Fire outbreaks are setting records all over Brazil, with flames burning the Amazon, the Cerrado, the Pantanal and the São Paulo state.
- Federal authorities say most fires are criminal and they are launching investigations.
- Smoke from fires spread through 10 Brazilian states, impacting air quality and air traffic.
“There won’t be anything left here,” Maria Márcia told Mongabay through text message while observing fire advancing a few meters away from her house. Márcia lives in PDS Terra Nossa, a land reform settlement in the southwest of Pará state, in the Brazilian Amazon, where land-grabbers are burning vegetation for the fourth year in a row.
Designed as a sustainable settlement where dwellers once could live from small plots of farmlands collecting fruits and nuts, PDS Terra Nossa is now mostly covered by pasture and soy. “They’ve burned everyone’s crops. How are we going to live? How are we going to sell our food?” said Márcia, the most outspoken PDS activist. She survived three death attempts and is now part of Pará’s state human rights defenders protection program.
On Aug. 22, the Federal Public Ministry in Pará urged federal and public bodies to take urgent measures to fight the fires in PDS Terra Nossa and the Munduruku Indigenous Territory, also in Pará’s southwest. The federal land reform agency, INCRA, which oversees the settlement management, sent Mongabay an email stating that the process of removing land-grabbers from the area is in the administrative stage.
The scenario at PDS Terra Nossa is part of Amazon’s worst fire season in the last 17 years, considering the period from January to August. However, the flames are not restricted to the rainforest: More than 110,000 fire outbreaks were registered in different parts of Brazil by the end of August, a 40% increase from 2023.
Fires had burned 15% of the Pantanal wetlands since the beginning of the year, and the number of fires in August doubled in the Cerrado savanna compared with the same month in 2023.
In the state of São Paulo, Brazil’s most populated, 2,600 fires were registered in only three days, from August 22-24. According to a report from the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, IPAM, most of the burning occurred in pasture and sugar cane crops. São Paulo’s Civil Defense said 99% of the outbreaks were likely ignited by humans — and likely illegal.
The burning explosion, which left two dead and 60 wounded, led the minister of environment and climate change, Marina Silva, to compare it to the Day of Fire, in 2019. In that incident, a coordinated group in Pará’s southwest set fire to several places, including PDS Terra Nossa, in support of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who slashed environmental regulations in Brazil.
Land grabbers had set vast areas on fire in a land reform settlement in the southwest of Pará. Image by Maria Márcia.
“Right now, it’s a real war against fire and crime,” Silva said in a press conference Aug. 25. “It’s an atypical situation. In one week, practically in two days, you have several municipalities burning at the same time [in São Paulo].”
A few days before, the minister had already stated that most outbreaks in the country were illegal, and those responsible would face consequences. The Federal Police, which is already investigating criminal outbreaks in the Pantanal, will now do the same work in the Amazon and São Paulo. In the Brazilian Congress, federal deputies presented bills to increase the penalties for fire crimes.
“What can’t happen is that we have to fight the fire on one side, and all the time, even with the [burning] ban, there are people setting fires,” said Silva, referring to fire bans in several parts of the country.
Brazil under smoke
Amazon and Pantanal communities are the most affected by the smoke. The Amazonas state capital, Manaus, is covered by a thick cloud of smoke, while in the Rondônia state capital, Porto Velho, air pollution is 95 times above the World Health Organization’s recommended limit.
Wind flows known as “flying rivers,” which usually takes moisture from the Amazon to other parts of Brazil, are now spreading smoke from the rainforest and Pantanal to five other states, including the far south and Brazil’s capital, Brasília. Flights have been canceled, and the air quality is considered “unhealthy” in many cities.
“The satellite images show the path the smoke is taking, and it makes clear that something that happens in the Amazon doesn’t just stay in the Amazon, but has consequences elsewhere,” Ane Alencar, director of science at the IPAM, told Mongabay.
Usually, an increase in Amazon fires is linked to high deforestation rates, since environmental offenders use the flames to burn the forest once it is on the ground. But burnings have raged despite significant reductions in deforestation rates, which fell 50% in 2023 and 27% in the first six months of 2024, compared with the same period last year.
According to Alencar, one of the main reasons is the severe drought hitting the Amazon, which prolonged 2023’s dry season and anticipated the one of 2024. “It means little rain, high temperatures and a drought situation as a whole,” said the researcher, who also coordinates fire monitoring for MapBiomas, a collaborative network that maps land use.
According to Alencar, many of the fires registered in the Amazon in the last months are related to illegal pasture renovation, but the dry weather makes it easier for the flames to spread to forestry areas.
That is another piece of this puzzle. Despite the overall reduction in Amazon deforestation, clearances have actually increased in some specific areas, which will now receive special attention from the federal government.
According to the Brazilian news outlet InfoAmazônia, the municipalities where deforestation advanced the most are the ones that registered the most significant drop in the number of environmental fines. The loosening of the monitoring on the ground resulted from the eight-month strike of federal environmental agents, which ended in mid-August.
“The reduction in inspections due to the strike, the very issue of the municipal elections in October, all of this has an impact on the dynamics of land use in the region, especially in the [agricultural] frontier region of the Amazon,” Alencar said.
Image banner: Tropical rainforests are not adapted to fire, and have no natural fire regime. Often, though, fires are set intentionally by landowners wanting to expand their fields, or by landgrabbers who burn the standing trees. Deforestation and degradation also makes rainforests more vulnerable, and means fire is more likely to spread. Image © Christian Braga / Greenpeace.
Amid record-high fires across the Amazon, Brazil loses primary forests
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