The number of fires in the Amazon reaches its highest level in 16 years

The brazilian amazon registered in June 3,075 forest fires20% more than in the same period last year (2,562) and the highest for this month in the last 16 years, the Government reported this Saturday.

The number of hot spots in the Brazilian part of the largest tropical forest in the world for a month of June was not as high as that registered in 2007, when 3,519 fires were counted, according to data measured by satellites from the National Research Institute. Space (INPE).

The number of fires in the Brazilian Amazon has been increasing exponentially in recent months, from 768 in April to 1,692 in May and up to 3,075 in June, and they should continue to increase because the dry season in the region begins in July ( from July to October), when the sources of fire usually break out.

In addition, the forecast is that forest fires will tend to increase even more this year as a result of the effects of the El Niño phenomenon, which should leave the region even drier and with less rain.

According to INPE, the Amazon accumulated 8,344 fires in the first half of this year, a number 10% higher than that of the first six months of 2022 (7,533) and the highest for the period in the last four years, as only surpassed by that measured between January and June 2019 (10,606).

Despite this growth, the fire has been even more severe in the Cerrado, as the Brazilian savannah is known, which registered 10,322 sources of heat in the first half of the year.

Of the total of 23,356 fires registered throughout Brazil in the first six months of this year (a number 3% higher than the same period in 2022: 22,670), 44.2% were detected in the Cerrado and 35.7% in the Amazon .

The Cerrado, the second largest ecosystem in Brazil and surrounding the Amazon, is an important agricultural horizon and ranchers tend to burn it, even in protected areas, to prepare the land for their crops.

Despite the fact that the area burned in the Cerrado is growing, the Amazon rainforest has historically been the Brazilian biome most affected by fires and concentrates 43% of all that has burned in the country in almost four decades.

Only in 2022 the area devastated by the flames in the Brazilian Amazon grew by 14% compared to 2021, with a total of 163,000 square kilometers of forest destroyed.

According to a study by the Institute for Environmental Research of the Amazon, the vegetation cover destroyed by fires in the region between 1985 and 2022 is about 809,500 kilometers, which is equivalent to about 19% of the entire Brazilian rainforest.

Fires destroy an annual average of 68,000 square kilometers of vegetation in the Amazon, an area equivalent to that of a country like Lithuania.

As in the Cerrado, the fires in the most extensive tropical forest on the planet are the result of burning related to deforestation and pasture management.

Deforestation in the Amazon increased by 60% in the four-year period of the Government of Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022) due to the reduction of controls, the dismantling of inspection bodies and the anti-environmentalist rhetoric of the far-right leader, who defends the exploitation of even environmental and indigenous reserves.

The recovery of the Brazilian Amazon is one of the main commitments of the government of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who took office last January and strives to combat illegal activities in the biome and to remind rich countries of the need to financially support this battle to avert a global climate crisis.

Source: EFE