Criminals may be taking advantage of climate change as record areas are burning in the Brazilian Amazon

BRAZIL, Brazil. Wildfires in Brazil have covered an area the size of Switzerland, and the level of destruction will take decades to recover from, if it ever does, according to a new satellite assessment.

The extent of forest that was lost or degraded was revealed as the smoke that blanketed the country cleared thanks to rains that may have ended the worst drought ever recorded in Brazil.

“These data are extremely alarming, it’s a very sharp spike,” Ane Alencar, scientific director of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, a Brazilian nonprofit, told the Associated Press.

The area burned between January and mid-October 2024 was 846% more than during the same period in 2023. This is five times more than the wildfires of 2019, when the rampant destruction of the Amazon made headlines under the rule of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. all over the world.

The estimate is provided by the National Institute for Space Research, which tracks official rates of deforestation in Brazil.

The outbreak of fires comes a year before the Amazonian city of Belen is set to host the UN’s annual COP30 climate conference. The level of destruction is causing Brazilian officials and experts to suspect that criminals are using climate change to their advantage.

Deforestation in the Amazon usually starts with chainsaws. Wet felled trees are left lying on the ground until they are dry enough to be set on fire. They are not even used for lumber.

Now that forests are drying up due to drought, offenders looking to create more pasture can skip the expensive and time-consuming step of cutting down trees. All it takes is a lighter and a few gallons of gasoline to ignite.

“Drought played an important role in the spread, but fire was also used as a weapon,” Alencar said.

“The resistance of the forest to severe drought has been found to be very low,” Andre Lima, secretary for deforestation control at the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change, told the AP in his office in Brasilia. “You don’t need 1 million people setting fires to cause a disaster. One thousand can do it. We recorded 500 large flares that started with a match.”

Due to human-induced climate change and the El Niño phenomenon, the world’s largest basin is suffering from two years of severe drought. Many rivers fell to record lows in 2023 and then broke those records again in 2024. Fish and endangered river dolphins perished in water too hot for them. Hundreds of river communities were left without transport.

Then the fire appeared. Wildfires spread across the region in September, doubling the area burned this year. With more than two months to go until 2024, this is already the largest area burned since the government began using the current methodology a decade ago.

The assessment of forest loss comes as delegates from around the world gather in the Colombian city of Cali for COP16, dedicated to biodiversity conservation.

The hypothesis that criminals are involved in climate change needs further study, Lima said. But there is some evidence of this. One clue is that the conservation area that suffered the most damage is the Jamanxim National Forest. Dozens of land grabbers illegally raise cattle here, hoping that their activities will be legalized.

It’s near the town of Novo Progreso, a deforestation hotspot where Bolsonaro, who favors economic development over forest conservation, won 83 percent of the vote in his failed 2022 re-election bid.

Fires have burned 1,900 square kilometers (733 square miles) of Jamanxi this year, mostly in September, a 700 percent increase from 2023, according to MapBiomas, a network of nongovernmental organizations that monitor land use.

The unprecedented growth in fires has prompted Brazil’s government to consider mandatory reforestation of all burned areas, a deterrent to encroachers hoping to turn the state forest into their own private pastures.

Lima believes local and state governments must also act, as most fires occur on private land in rural areas, which is their jurisdiction. “We need structural policy changes to address climate change,” he said.

The increase in forest fires in the Amazon is part of a global trend and exacerbates climate change. A recent study published in the journal Science estimated that carbon emissions from wildfires increased by 60% between 2001 and 2023. Forests and all the carbon they store are becoming increasingly vulnerable to fires, researchers warn.

Unlike wildfires in North America, where flames sometimes reach the tops of trees and spread from there, in the Amazon rainforest, fire spreads mostly through leaves on the ground, causing less damage. The Deforestation Monitoring Agency, known as INPE, considers these areas to be burn scars rather than deforestation.

That’s why, despite a surge in fires, this year’s rate of deforestation is still slowing under President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and could end 2024 with a 60% reduction compared to the Bolsonaro years. This shows that deforestation is only one indicator that does not give a complete picture of the damage caused to the forest in a given year.

“In areas where the fire has been very intense, the forest can be completely destroyed,” Claudio Almeida, a senior officer at INPE, told the AP. “Even regions where the fire was not as intense are now severely degraded and fragile. Another season of intense drought and fires could devastate the forest.”

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