By AFP - Agence France Presse
Brazil saw a 79% jump in area burned by fires in 2024: Monitor
by Lucia LACURCIA
Last year, forest fires in Brazil consumed a total area larger than the whole of Italy, a monitor said on Wednesday, as the country continues to fight fires, often caused by farmers and ranchers illegally expanding their territory.
Around 30.8 million hectares (119,000 square miles) of vegetation were burned in Brazil in 2024, an increase of 79% compared to 2023, the MapBiomas monitoring platform reported.
Fires in the Amazon, a crucial carbon sink for the rest of the world as well as a global biodiversity hotspot, were responsible for 58% of the damage.
The figures are discouraging news for the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which in November will host the UN COP30 climate conference in the Amazonian city of Belém.
The 2024 figures represent the largest area burned since 2019.
Around 8.5 million hectares of forest were burned in 2024, compared to 2.2 million in 2023, and in the Amazon, for the first time, fires destroyed more forests than pastures, according to the data.
“This is a terrible indicator because once forests are burned, they become more susceptible to future fires,” said Ane Alencar, from MapBiomas.
Climate change makes vegetation drier and therefore more prone to fires.
However, in Brazil, the main cause of fires are ranchers and farmers who clear land for pasture and agriculture - a crime that the government is fighting to curb.
Lula has made the preservation of the Amazon a priority of his government, following lax protections against human expansion in the territory under his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro.
But in September, Lula admitted that the country was not “100% prepared” to face a wave of forest fires that his government attributed to “climate terrorism”.
The Brazilian Amazon recorded its highest number of fires in 17 years in 2024, according to government data published earlier this month, after the vast biome suffered months of a long drought.
There were 140,328 fires detected by satellite images during the year, according to the National Institute for Space Research (INPE).
This was 42% more than the 98,634 fires recorded in 2023 - and the highest number since 2007, when 186,463 forest fires were observed.
These figures, as well as Wednesday's, come after some hope last year, when INPE said that deforestation in the region had fallen by more than 30% in the 12 months to August 2024.
Scientists warn that continued deforestation will put the Amazon on track to reach a point where it emits more carbon than it absorbs, accelerating climate change.
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