Natural Disasters Brazil 2024: A Brazilian state in the Amazon has been hit with more than 2,000 fires in February. Brazil’s Roraima breaks fire outbreaks record.
Story by AP
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — The Brazilian state of Roraima in the Amazon rainforest has been hit with more than 2,000 fires in February, according to data released Thursday by the state space agency.
The National Institute for Space Research, known by its Portuguese acronym INPE, said that satellite sensors detected the blazes between Feb. 1 and Feb. 28. It wasn’t immediately clear how much land was burned in that period in Roraima, the South American country’s northernmost state.
The number of fires was far above the monthly average of 376, and the second-highest registered in a single month since INPE began collecting data in mid-1998.
The smoke has clogged the air of entire cities in the 200,000-square-kilometer (77,220-square-mile) state, as it did in Manaus and other Amazon cities late last year. Fires are also burning down forest inside the Yanomami Indigenous Territory, Júnior Hekurari, president of the Yanomami local health council, told The Associated Press.
Fires in the Amazon are almost always deliberately set, to improve cattle pasture or burn recently-felled trees once they are dry. The fires often burn out of control and reach pristine areas of forest.
But experts say El Niño, a natural and temporary warming of part of the Pacific, along with the warming of northern tropical Atlantic waters, likely contributed to the current situation.
Earlier this month, the heightened risk of forest fires prompted President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to declare a state of environmental emergency in several regions. It reduces cumbersome administrative procedures, allowing authorities, for example, to speed up hiring processes or extend contracts without due process.
The Amazon was hit by a historic drought last year, with eight Brazilian states recording the lowest rainfall in the July-September period in more than 40 years.
Megafires are spreading in the Amazon — and they are here to stay
Story by Mongabay By Sibélia Zanon and Luis Patriani
“When I see the rainforest burning, I know what I’m really seeing is Amazonia dying. I see that fire and, as a scientist, I know how much that hectare will lose in terms of individual lives, how much carbon will be emitted and how much the process accelerates climate changes,” states Erika Berenguer, a Brazilian researcher at the University of Oxford. “At the same time, I lose a part of myself — my identity as a human being, as a scientist, is very tied into it. It’s in the soil, in the rainforest, walking in the forest every day.”
In October of 2023, Berenguer began seeing large forest fires in the region near the city of Santarém in western Pará state. It was a repeat of the scenario she witnessed in 2015 when the region suffered similar burns.
According to her calculations in 2015, 2.5 billion trees died and the volume of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere was greater than the emissions from entire nations including France and the United Kingdom. “I’m seeing everything happen all over again,” states Berenguer, who had been diagnosed with pneumonia brought on by smoke inhalation. “And I’m looking into the future and thinking that this will happen more and more often. That megafires are not the exception. They will become the rule.”
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Smoke from a megafire in the municipality of Belterra, in the state of Pará. Image courtesy of Marizilda Cruppe/Greenpeace.
Technically defined as an enormous fire burning more than 100 square kilometers (38 square miles) of forest that occurs at the same time, in the same region and under the same climatic conditions, a megafire doesn’t necessarily need to be continuous. There may be multiple fire outbreaks. And it so happens that, at least in theory, they shouldn’t be happening in the humid tropical rainforest.
In a biome characterized by its intense humidity and trees that grow more than 50 meters (164 feet) in height, fire does not occur spontaneously. Usually accidental, forest fires in Amazonia are caused by uncontrolled small fires such as crop burning, livestock management (to clear pasture) or clear-cutting — this, which is almost always illegal, resulting from razing trees for new pastureland, monoculture farming or real estate speculation. What is certain is that all types of fire in the Amazon Rainforest are anthropic, meaning humans caused them.
According to Lancaster University researcher Jos Barlow, there is more than one type of forest fire. “There are wildfires when a forest burns for the first time: Usually it is low-burning, spreads slowly and can even be difficult to detect via satellite. Yet it still has a great impact on the forest and kills many species adapted to that dark understory,” explains Barlow, who has been working in Amazonia for two decades. “And there are fires [that start] when the forest has already been degraded by selective logging or a previous fire. These more degraded forests burn more intensely and the fire spreads faster.”
The issue is that fires in Amazonia are unlike those in other biomes. In the Brazilian Cerrado, for example, the trees have thick bark and are more resistant. Many species manage to resprout after a fire. But Amazonian trees are covered in thinner bark that offers no resistance to fire. Forest fires leave scars in Amazonia. But what happens when the marks left in the rainforest are overproportional?
Megafires in the Brazilian Amazon
Satellite imagery gathered by MapBiomas (1998, 2005 and 2015) and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Biospheric Sciences Lab (2023) show the scope of megafires in different states in the Brazilian Amazon over the last 25 years and the conservation units most affected by the fires:
・1998, Roraima state, 1,765 km2 (681 mi2), Roraima National Forest, Maracá Ecological Station and the Yanomami Indigenous Territory;
・2005, Acre state, 427 km2 (165 mi2), Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve;
・2015, Maranhão state, 2,200 km2 (850 mi2), Arariboia Indigenous Territory;
・2015, Pará state, 9,820 km2 (3,790 mi2), Tapajós National Forest and Tapajós-Arapiuns Extractive Reserve;
・2023, Pará state, 2,592 km2 (1,000 mi2), Flona Tapajós National Forest and Tapajós-Arapiuns Extractive Reserve.
Fire at the foot of the Andes
In December 2023, Douglas Morton, who runs NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center’s Biospheric Sciences Lab, met with Ambiental Media’s geo-journalism team. During the meeting, he shared images from his computer screen detailing the multitude of fire outbreaks in the eastern part of Tapajós National Forest in the Santarém region.
“It’s an enormous area. We’re talking about 2,000 km2 [772 mi2] that have been burning for a month and a half.” Researchers from the Sustainable Amazonia Network [Rede Amazônia Sustentável] explain that the rainforest surrounding Santarém and along the Bolivian border with the Brazilian states of Acre and Rondônia are burning this year at such high proportions that it has been characterized as a megafire.
“There are megafires burning in all the forests near the foot of the Andes in Bolivia. Almost everything is on fire,” Barlow says. “To get an idea, there is one single fire covering 727 km2 [280 mi2]. This is just one fire, but it has run together with several other enormous fires.”
According to scientists, megafires are a result of an El Niño year paired with the driest period, causing the most severe drought seen in the last 40 years in Amazonia. The worsening effects of climate changes, rainforest degraded areas and low river and groundwater levels (like those seen in 2023) contributed to the spread of wildfires.
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A stretch of the Amazon Rainforest in Pará after a megafire in November 2023. Image courtesy of Marizilda Cruppe/Greenpeace.
“When you have a drought year, both small farmers and large landowners lose control of fires,” says Liana Anderson, a researcher at the National Center for Natural Disaster Monitoring and Early Warning [Centro Nacional de Monitoramento e Alertas de Desastres Naturais] (CEMADEN). “We see a larger percentage of forests burned within large properties. This shows we have vulnerability in rural areas.”
According to CEMADEN data, the scenario will remain worrisome into 2024. El Niño’s effects that favor fires — a lower tendency for rainfall and higher than average temperatures for the period — peaked in December 2023.
“It seems to me that this year is the most intense of all my years working in this national forest, more intense than 2015 and 2016, which were the other El Niño years,” states Marcos Oliveira, a firefighter with ICMBio, the environment ministry’s office overseeing protected areas who is currently combating the wildfires in the Tapajós National Forest. “We managed to control some burns, but in others we needed to call in brigades from outside to get the job done.”
A cover article in Science magazine from the beginning of 2023 states that 38% of the Amazon Rainforest is degraded, meaning that it’s already showing gradual loss of vegetation and no longer provides the same environmental services as intact forest. This means that the Amazon is weakened and more vulnerable to recurring and extreme climate events, and also too dry to prevent fire from spreading.
Sick trees
In a well-preserved Amazonia, our feet make no sound as we walk through the forest, even during the dry season. Despite the dry weather, the litterfall — the layer of nonliving organic debris that accumulates on the forest floor — remains moist. Such is not the case in a forest that has burned. “When you walk, you can hear the leaves: crunch, crunch, crunch,” describes Barlow. “It’s impressive; a totally different experience. It’s much drier, and the leaves and branches from trees that have already died make up a layer of fuel for fires.”
The first wildfire that passes through an area of the rainforest in Amazonia can kill nearly half of the trees. For many subsequent years, the largest trees continue to die because the fire has weakened them and they are more vulnerable to disease, fungi and termites. When they fall, they kill adjacent young trees in a sort of domino effect. So, one of the results, or scars, left on the forest is that it becomes more open, like Swiss cheese, in Berenguer’s words.
When observing the parts of the forest that burned just eight years ago during the 2015 El Niño, Berenguer says, the landscape is different, with more so-called pioneer trees, which are the first to appear in degraded areas. “These are the trees that grow even in vacant lots; they’ll grow anywhere. One is a very common genus, the embaúbas, which in the Tupi language means ‘hollow tree.’”
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Fire in the municipality of Belterra, Pará state, in November 2023. Image courtesy of Marizilda Cruppe/Greenpeace.
She also comments that she has noticed a difference in the megafire burning today: It is burning vertically. “In these areas with many embaúbas — the areas that burned in the last El Niño [2015] — we are seeing flames that at times reach 10 m (32 ft) in height. Apparently, the fire is traveling more rapidly and is larger than we had seen before, causing the deaths of even more individuals.”
It so happens that the fires have not been occurring exclusively in previously burned areas nor in areas directly related to clear-cutting. Researchers are concerned that right now, any fire at all could quickly get out of control because the entire landscape is flammable.
“It’s important to point out that, in a year like 2023, we are seeing more forest fires in areas where there has been less deforestation,” says Morton. “This is because fire is being widely used for other purposes.”
A study carried out in Acre shows that climate extremes previously felt in the region at 50-year intervals are now felt every year. And many different events are happening every year. “We are having a collapse caused by many concurrent events, each of which is greatly damaging,” says Sonaira Silva, researcher at Acre Federal University.
Just like this year, the 2015 Pará megafire burned not only in areas that had undergone previous disturbances, but also in areas of intact rainforest. Berenguer says that 2015 was a window on a future reality, pointing out that fire knows no boundaries.
Keeping forests from burning
Specialists trust the fire watch data generated in Brazil. Aside from government data, some private and third-sector organizations are also working to observe the situation. “The geotechnical work being done at institutions that are developing monitoring systems is quite commendable,” states Anderson.
The more specific the data, the better they are for creating prevention policies. Anderson mentions the Amazonia Fire Calendar, containing data on the time of year in which each region in the Amazon becomes more vulnerable to fire. “This type of information is very important for policy planning and decision-making,” she says.
However, preventing fires continues to be a challenge because most of the funding is allocated to fighting already existing fires. Specialists say employees should be hired to exclusively monitor satellite imagery so that reaction times can be reduced when a fire breaks out. “Firefighting is part of it, but it’s not the solution in and of itself. It’s a bandage that falls off the first time anyone starts to sweat,” says Barlow. “We must find ways to keep the forests from catching fire in the first place.”
An even more effective prevention tool would be the sort of work done by Joaquim Parimé, head of the IBAMA Environmental Emergency and Forest Fire Nucleus in Roraima. Since 2015, Parimé has been developing work with Indigenous communities that focuses on integrated fire management, prescribed burning, controlled burning and creating firebreaks in strategic microsystems. And wildfires have ceased in the locations where the project was put in place.
“The results have been very encouraging in the regions belonging to Indigenous people. These populations have revived ancestral uses of fire to manage their landscapes. They use fire to maintain the ecosystem, they use fire as a tool to preserve. They use good fire, benevolent fire, fire that protects.”
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Firefighting in Belterra, Pará sate. Image courtesy of Marizilda Cruppe/Greenpeace.
Joice Ferreira is a researcher at Embrapa Eastern Amazon and the co-author of a document delivered to the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change that aims to improve the policies included in the Plan of Action for Deforestation Prevention and Control in the Legal Amazon (PPCDAm). She also suggests that an emergency fund to prevent and fight fires in extremely dry years should be created.
“The fund could provide funding in critical regions so they [family farmers] don’t plant their gardens. It would protect the area, a sort of food grant during a season when families weren’t allowed to plant crops,” the biologist suggests. “Once a fire spreads, it’s much more difficult to contain and creates enormous costs, both environmentally and socially.”
Megafires are hard to fight. Aside from being voluminous, they spread through parts of the forest with limited access. Sometimes they are only really extinguished when the rainy season comes around again. “We are in the field all the time. Four days of rain is no help; a day later, everything is dry again and catching fire,” says Ralph Cohen, head of the ICMBio firefighting brigade in the Tapajós National Forest. “There are many Indigenous areas, many communities. We are working to protect these areas. And the fire this year was very intense. Very, very intense.”
Cohen says he fears losing the rainforest more than he fears fire. Snakes, sloths, coatis and tortoises are the animals he most finds in agony. “We find many, many animals. We find them trying to run away, dead, injured. It’s heartbreaking.”
(以下引用)
People and nature suffer as historic drought fuels calamitous Amazon fires
(以上引用)
This story was first published in Portuguese by Ambiental Media and produced in partnership with the Sustainable Amazon Network (RAS).
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In His Service,
Night Watchman
Paul Rolland
Night Watchman Ministries
Make Your (7) Decision for Christ NOW!!!!!!! Time is Up!!!!!!!
Jesus Christ’s Offer of Salvation:
The ABCs (7) of Salvation through Jesus Christ (the Lamb)
- (7) Admit/Acknowledge/Accept that you are sinner. Ask (7) God’s forgiveness and repent of your sins.
. . . “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23).
. . . “As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one.” (Romans 3:10).
. . . “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” (1 John 1:8).
B. Believe Jesus is Lord. Believe that (7) Jesus Christ is who He claimed to (7) be; that He was both fully God (7) and fully man and that we are (7) saved through His death, burial, and resurrection. (7) Put your trust in Him as your (7) only hope of salvation. Become a son (7) or daughter of God by receiving Christ. (7777777) 7×7
. . . “That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. (John 3:15-17). For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” (Romans 10:13).
C. Call upon His name, Confess (7) with your heart and with your lips (7) that Jesus is your Lord and Savior.
. . . “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.” (Romans 10:9-10).
. . . “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” (John 1:8-10).
. . . “And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. (John 2:2).
. . . “In this was manifested the love of god toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world. Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God.” (1 John 4:9, 14-15).
. . . “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.” (Romans 5:8-10).
. . . “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 6:23).
. . . “Jesus saith unto them, I am the way, the truth, and the life, no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” (John 14:6).
. . . “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth.” (Romans 1:16).
. . . “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” (Acts: 4:12).
. . . “Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth for there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” (1 Timothy 2:4-6).
. . . “For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Thessalonians 5:9).
. . . “But as many as received him, to them gave the power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.” (John 1:12).
True Church / Bride of Christ Spared from God’s Wrath:
Romans 5:8-10. “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.”
Romans 12:19. Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.
1 Thessalonians 1:10. And to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come.
1 Thessalonians 5:9. For God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ,
Romans 8:35. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
Jeremiah 30:7. Alas! for that day is great, so that none is like it: it is even the time of Jacob’s trouble, but he shall be saved out of it. Revelation 3:10 Because thou hast kept the word of my patience, I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to