setembro, 09 2024

By WWF-Brasil

Most part of the fires that have been affecting the main Brazilian biomes in the last two months are not occurring in recently deforested areas, but in areas of primary forest - that is, in places with native vegetation with great biological diversity, according to new data from the Deter System, from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE).

The most serious case is that of the Pantanal, where the fires essentially affected natural ecosystems in August: 89% of the fire outbreaks recorded occurred in areas of native vegetation and less than 1% in areas where vegetation was recently removed.

In the Cerrado, in August, 67% of the fire outbreaks occurred in areas of primary vegetation and 3% in recently deforested areas. In the Amazon, these values ​​are 53% and 13%, respectively.

Although in the Amazon and Cerrado, wildfires are historically seen as the final stage of deforestation, since fire is used to “clear” devastated areas, the data indicate that there is a predominance of fires in natural areas of primary vegetation, with very high ecosystem value.

According to Mariana Napolitano, Director of Strategy at WWF-Brazil, the data on fires and deforestation in August support the federal government’s suspicions that wildfires are a tool for degrading the forest in order to facilitate soil clearing and tree felling, associated with the high levels of degradation in the Amazon.

“The record number of hotspots detected in August in the Amazon had an uneven distribution, with more than half of them concentrated in areas of primary native vegetation and only 13% in recently deforested areas. The combination of climate change caused by global warming with environmental degradation has created a favourable scenario to the criminal use of fire for a forest conversion that will probably be detected in future mappings of the devastated area in the Brazilian Amazon”, says Mariana
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In August 2024 alone, 38,266 fire outbreaks were recorded in the Amazon - the highest number for the month since 2010. In just 31 days, the biome had more fire outbreaks than in the first eight months of last year (31,488 fire outbreaks). With the Amazon ravaged by an extreme drought, the out-of-control wildfires produced a dense cloud of smoke over vast stretches of the biome, which spread to distant areas of the country throughout the month of August, affecting at least 11 states.

“If the current scenario of wildfires and deforestation poses a risk to health, especially for those closest to the fire areas, and jeopardises the food security of isolated communities that depend on fishing, the future scenario is perhaps even more worrying,” says Mariana.

According to her, the destruction of the Amazon is very close to the tipping point - the limit calculated by science from which the Amazon rainforest can no longer sustain itself and becomes a poorer, drier and more degraded ecosystem.

“This represents a very high risk for our country, for the continent and for the planet as a whole because the Amazon is a climate regulator, with an important role in the rainfall regime in South America, and one of the richest habitats for tropical biodiversity,” warns the specialist.

Deforestation

Despite the increase in wildfires, deforestation dropped in August in the Amazon. Between the 1st and 30th, 501 km2 were deforested, a reduction of 11% compared to the same period in 2023.

The deforested area was the second smallest in the historical series, behind only August 2017, when 278 km2 were lost. Two-thirds of the devastation recorded in the biome last month occurred in Pará state, (191 km2) and in Mato Grosso state (138 km2), respectively 38% and 28% of the total. The fire scars mapped in August, however, total 4,417 km2, about 500% more than in August last year.

Daniel Silva, a conservation specialist at WWF-Brazil, highlights that, despite the scenario of falling deforestation in the states of Amazonas, Pará and Mato Grosso, which concentrates deforestation in the region, there is still a high level of devastation in those states.

“Therefore, the strengthening of command and control measures must continue, and the inspection bodies, as well as the indigenous peoples who preserve the forest, must be valued and supported,” says Silva. 
He adds that deforestation, wildfires and other forms of degradation of the Amazon ecosystem are already causing changes in the forest, whose capacity to capture carbon dioxide is not infinite. “The more we destroy nature, the less rain and abundant rivers we will have available. We can already see that this year the drought has arrived earlier in the biome and this is not an isolated fact. The Amazon requires our attention and effective preservation measures,” he states. 

In the Cerrado, according to data from Inpe’s Deter-B system, August was the fourth consecutive month in which the conversion of native vegetation dropped compared to the previous year.  The Cerrado lost 388 km2 between August 1 and 30, and 832 km2 since July 1st, a reduction of 15% and 27%, respectively, when compared to the same periods of the previous year.

“Despite these positive signs, the levels of deforestation and conversion in the Cerrado are still high and worrying,” says Silva. According to him, during the Deter system’s reference monitoring period, which runs from August 2023 to July 2024, the most biodiverse savannah in the world lost 7,015 km2 - the equivalent of a quarter of the area of ​​Belgium, or 4.5 times the area of London.

“This number is about 11% higher than that recorded in the previous year and 37% higher than the average destruction recorded in the Deter 6-year historical series,” says Silva. The states of the so-called Matopiba (Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia states), where soybeans are expanding at a worrying rate over native vegetation, accounted for 73% of the biome’s lost area in August, according to him.