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BRAZIL-ENVIRONMENT-FIRE
Record fires ravage Brazil’s Amazon and Pantanal regions
BRASILIA, Nov 2, 2020 (BSS/AFP) – A record high number of fires scorched
Brazil’s Amazon and Pantanal wetlands last month, official data showed on
Sunday, as deforestation and climate change wreaked havoc on some of the
planet’s most valuable ecosystems.
The Amazon rainforest has been described as the Earth’s “lungs” due to its
role in producing almost 10 percent of the world’s oxygen.
The Pantanal further south is one of the world’s largest tropical wetlands
and a biodiversity paradise that extends across Brazil’s borders into
Paraguay and Bolivia.
The number of fires typically falls in October as the Amazon approaches
the rainy season.
But Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research (INPE) on Sunday
recorded 17,326 fires in the Amazon in October, more than double the number
seen in the same month in 2019.
Satellite imagery showed close to 100,000 fires in the first 10 months of
2020, more than were seen in the whole of last year.
The INPE also detected almost 3,000 individual fires in the Pantanal, a
new monthly record since data collection began in 1998.
The region — 23 percent of which is estimated to have gone up in smoke
this year — has seen a record-breaking 21,115 fires so far this year, more
than double the number registered in all of 2019.
Experts and environmental NGOs blame the worsening fires on Brazilian
president Jair Bolsonaro, a climate change skeptic who supports opening both
regions to logging and farming.
Some fires are the result of burning to prepare the land for livestock,
despite a 120-day ban on the practice imposed in July.
“With deforestation rates increasing in recent years, warnings by
researchers were ignored by the government: deforestation and fire go
together,” said Mariana Napolitano, the head of the science program at World
Wildlife Fund (WWF) Brazil.
“After deforesting the jungle, the offenders set fires to clean up the
accumulated organic material… at the end of the month, with the arrival of
the rains, the pace of the fires seems to be slowing down, but we can hardly
depend on climate factors,” she said.
“What happened in the dry season in the Amazon and Pantanal cannot be
repeated.”
Climate change has also played a role in the fires, with a team of
international researchers warning this year that rising global temperatures
posed a “critical threat” to the Pantanal’s delicate ecosystem.
President Bolsonaro has denounced a campaign of “disinformation” about the
Pantanal and the Amazon, even blaming local indigenous people and activists
for setting the fires.
BSS/AFP/FI/ 1334 hrs