Last year, most fires broke out in Brazil since 2010. People are to blame.
The number of fires in Brazil has risen in the last year. Compared to the previous year, the Brazilian National Space Research Institute recorded an increase of 12.7 percent. There were 222,798 fires in the country last year, the highest since 2010.
In the Brazilian Amazon, the institute counted more than 103,000 fires, an annual increase of almost sixteen percent. According to INPE, 22,000 fires broke out in Brazil’s largest wetland, the Pantanal, last year, 120 percent more than in 2019. The National Space Research Institute is using satellite imagery to monitor the situation in the forests.
Â
The Amazon and the Pantanal are some of the rarest ecosystems in the world. The Amazon rainforest, which is 60 percent in Brazil, plays a significant role in absorbing the greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. He therefore earned the nickname “green lung” of the planet. Pantanal, part of which is located in southwestern Brazil, is home to thousands of species of plants and animals, many of which are rare.
Last year, devastating fires devastated almost a quarter of the Pantanal region, which extends into Bolivia and Paraguay, while the area was hit by the worst drought in nearly half a century.
Footage of the burned landscape and dead animals shocked the world, and the Brazilian government, led by the far-right president, faced criticism for not stopping the destruction. Jair Bolsonaro, one of the skeptics of climate change, says he prefers economic interests to environmental ones.
Under his rule, deforestation in the Amazon increased sharply, which was not stopped even by the coronavirus pandemic. According to INPE, a forest larger than Jamaica (which is comparable in size to the Central Bohemian Region) disappeared in the Amazon from August 2019 to last August, which is a twelve-year record.
Experts attribute the fires in the Amazon, mostly to people trying to expand the land for agriculture, mining or timber. According to ecologists, climate change is contributing to the spread of fires.