Brazil is still battling tens of thousands of fires on Friday evening, September 13, fueled by the worst drought ever recorded in the country, with major cities such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro under threat.
“The federal government, in cooperation with state and municipal governments, is working to combat the fires,” President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva wrote on the Bluesky social network, a fallback solution since X was banned in Brazil.
Key areas for biodiversity affected
There were more fires in the first 12 days of September this year than in the whole of September 2023, with 49,266 fires compared to 46,486, according to figures from the National Institute for Space Investigations based on data collected by satellites.
As of midnight on Thursday, 60.7% of the fires recorded in September in South America were burning in Brazil, according to the same source. Many of the fires are in key natural areas for biodiversity such as the Amazon, the Cerrado and the Pantanal.
The fires also reached cities, including São Paulo, which saw fires approach its northern neighborhoods on Friday. A police helicopter was trying to put out a forest fire near the Brasilandia favela.
In less than two weeks in September, Brazil emitted four megatons (four million tons) of carbon dioxide, Mark Parrington of the European Copernicus Observatory told AFP.
Worldwide, the fires have generated between ten and 15 megatons of CO2 in total, he added.
“We are reaching the peak of the fire season,” according to the specialist.
Regions in “danger”
Authorities have said that most of the fires, some of which have spread to Uruguay and Argentina, are caused by criminal activity or agriculture. President Lula has called on the population to denounce those responsible, with the government announcing tougher sanctions on Wednesday.
These tens of thousands of outbreaks are spreading all the more easily as Brazil is going through its worst period of drought since records began. Experts attribute this extreme situation in particular to climate change.
The National Institute of Meteorology has placed on “danger” alert the regions of the Southeast, where São Paulo and Rio are located, but also the center of the country, which is experiencing particularly low humidity levels, between 12 and 20%.
“When night falls, the ground is no longer humid, the temperature just drops a little,” São Paulo Civil Defense spokesman Captain Roberto Farina told Folha newspaper.
“It seems like the fire is going out, but the embers continue to burn imperceptibly. The next day, it is hot and the embers ignite again,” he added.
In Mangaratiba, near Rio, visibility is reduced by smoke from fires that have been burning for two days in the surrounding mountains.
“We see on TV that they talk about it (the fires) in the Amazon, but we know that it is the case all over Brazil,” Gilberto de Oliveira Santos, a 79-year-old resident, told AFP. “We feel it in the air, it is visual, the smoke, the darkness and it causes problems in the nostrils,” he continued.
- BFMTV.com
