Battered by rain, Brazil now braces for wildfires

Andre Cabette Fabio, Reuters

First the floods — now the fires. With hundreds of thousands left homeless after unprecedented floods soaked the south, Brazil is now facing a record run of wildfires, a nation caught on the frontline of climate change. “We are really seeing that climate change came with full force, with a severe impact … We’ve never had climate, hydrological and environmental conditions such as these,” said Andre Lima, head of deforestation control at the Ministry of Environment.

This year’s unprecedented floods have drenched a key agricultural region in the south, with rains damaging hundreds of thousands of homes since May, and destroying vast swathes of crops, vital for food and foreign currency alike.

Now Brazil faces months of record wildfires, the devastation already underway and set to worsen in coming months as high heat and winds tear through the midwest up towards the north. As of June, anyway considered early for fires, a record area of the Amazon, the Cerrado savanna and Pantanal wetlands had burned to a cinder, according to the National Institute for Space Research.

In Brazil as a whole, wildfires destroyed 77,448 square km of land in the first half of this year, 50% more than the previous record. In the Pantanal — the world’s largest wetland area spanning Bolivia, Paraguay and Brazil — 2,639 fires have been logged in June alone, more than five times the previous record.

“Climate has changed a lot, it has become unpredictable, dry winds that should come in August are already here,” said Rubens Aquino Ferraz, who lives in the Kadiweu Indigenous territory in Mato Grosso do Sul state in midwestern Brazil. Ferraz is one of 53 Indigenous brigadiers hired by the government to prevent and fight fires in his reserve, which spans 539,000 hectares (1.3 million acres) of savanna, forest and wetlands.

The worst fires are still to come.

Most of the big fires are ignited by farmers and land grabbers who want to renovate their pastures or convert natural habitat into profitable farmland. Peak burning season runs from July to October, when critical areas of the Amazon dry up.

According to Ferraz, “prescribed fires” — when vegetation is burned under controlled conditions to head off a bigger fire hazard ahead — even had to go on hold in June as dangerously dry conditions risked spreading the blazes beyond human control.

“With climate the way it is, prevention became much more difficult,” he said. Wildfires are a growing concern worldwide, as high temperatures dry out forests while farming, logging and mining degrade natural areas, making the land all the more flammable.

According to 2023 analysis from the World Resources Institute, a global research center, today’s wildfires destroy twice the tree cover that they did 20 years ago, feeding into what scientists call a “climate feedback loop”.

Under the loop, blazes release carbon, exacerbating the warming process and driving ever more fires and carbon release. A 2022 report from the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that extreme fires would increase 14% by 2030, 30% by 2050 and 50% by the end of this century.

The Kadiweu brigade was established in 2020, when the Pantanal was hit by record wildfires that killed an estimated 17 million vertebrates, including giant anteaters and caimans, close cousins to alligators. According to data released last month by MapBiomas — a collaboration between universities, nonprofits and tech firms — the Pantanal has lost about 81% of its surface water since 1985.

Mariana Dias, a researcher at MapBiomas, told reporters the biome had previously experienced extreme dryness — “but now things are different”, with less than 40% of its river springs protected by natural vegetation. Eudes de Souza, chief of the Kadiweu territory, has seen first hand how his land has changed, and says heavy grain farming by river springs left the Aquidaban river, at the border of his territory, bone dry. As the dry season reaches the southern and eastern Amazon, under most pressure from farmers and land grabbers, the fire crisis is only expected to deepen. Last year, the forest went through its worst drought ever recorded, and authorities say this year’s might surpass it.

“Drought is just starting in the Amazon, and all indications are that it could be one of the worst in history,” said Rodrigo de Agostinho, president of Ibama, Brazil’s federal environmental enforcement agency.

Although Amazon deforestation has slowed under President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has vowed to restore environmental protection, Agostinho expects more damage in the second half of this year. Even after years of intense deforestation, “the forest naturally regrows, and people keep setting it on fire until that stops,” so land can be turned into farmland.

Researchers fear that deforestation and fires could push the Amazon past a tipping point after which the forests would begin to die out, turning a carbon sink into a carbon source - a shift already detected in some areas.

“I am 53 years old, and I had never seen fish dying because of river water becoming lukewarm,” as happened in 2023, said Chiquinho Arara, chief at the Arara do Rio Amonia territory.

This year, the dry season has started earlier, and he expects it to be “much stronger” than last year’s.

“If you don’t have trees, sun rays hit the ground directly, and of course temperature rises,” he said.

“This contributes to climate change, a result of the greed from big landowners and farmers -and we are paying for it.”