2019, 2020, 2021 Brought Legal Fire Bans In Brazilian Amazon, But Only The First Had Any Positive Impact

In August 2019, the number of fires in the Brazilian Amazon skyrocketed, making international headlines and prompting protests in cities like London, Paris and Toronto. While the global community was shocked by images of burning trees and animals, in Brazil, the arrival of the smoke in the country’s business capital and largest city, São Paulo, made the urban population suddenly wake up to the problem.

The crisis also drew the attention of the scientific community, which has since invested more effort into creating tools and data to understand the dynamics of fire in the Amazon, a biome not naturally adapted to burning. “All this caused a stir among researchers, who began to ask themselves, ‘What is going on?'” Manoela Machado, a researcher with the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, told Mongabay.

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After Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office as president in January 2023, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon dropped by 50%. However, fires broke new records last year amid the historic drought that hit the region. “If we hadn’t reduced deforestation, we would have had an even bigger catastrophe. It was a very dry year,” Alencar said. Another possible reason for the mismatch between the number of fires and the deforested area in 2023 is that much of the swaths of land cleared under Bolsonaro’s watch had not yet been burned by the end of his tenure. “Years of deforestation have accumulated, and it doesn’t take just one year of burning to release all that biomass,” Machado said.

Fire is used even before deforestation and continues to be used for many years after the forest has been felled. It can take up to five years of repeated fires to make a deforested area ready for pastures or soy crops, the experts say. “They burn before deforesting, to weaken the vegetation, and then continue burning for another three or four years to reach a level where they can have pasture,” Machado said. Fire continued to sweep through the Amazon in the first months of 2024. From January to March, wildfires burned more than 26,369 square kilometers (10,181 square miles) of the Brazilian Amazon, a 254% increase from the same period last year, according to MapBiomas, a research collective that tracks land-use changes through satellite imagery.

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https://news.mongabay.com/2024/06/fire-bans-not-effective-as-the-amazon-and-pantanal-burn-study-says/