Area destroyed by fires on the rise in Brazil

The plant area destroyed by fires in Brazil increased by 79% in 2024 to 30.8 million hectares, higher than that of Italy, according to a report from the monitoring platform MapBiomas published on Wednesday. This is the largest area burned in the Latin American country in one year since 2019.

The Amazon, a gigantic natural region with a crucial ecosystem for climate regulation, was the most affected with some 17.9 million hectares ravaged, or 58% of the total, and more than all the areas burned in the whole country in 2023, specifies the study.

The year 2024 was “atypical and alarming”, summarizes Ane Alencar, coordinator of MapBiomas Fire, the monitoring platform of the Brazilian Climate Observatory. According to official data, more than 140,000 fire outbreaks were recorded in 2024, an unprecedented number in 17 years and an increase of 42% compared to 2023.

Scientists believe that the scale of these fires is linked to global warming, which makes vegetation drier, making it easier for the flames to spread. But they are in almost all cases caused by humans.

Ane Alencar warns in particular about the fires which have affected forests, key areas for the capture of carbon responsible for global warming: 8.5 million hectares were devastated in 2024, compared to 2.2 million in 2023.

And for the first time in the Amazon, there were more forests burned than pastures. “This is a negative indicator, because once forests succumb to fire, they remain very vulnerable to new fires,” warns Ane Alencar.

These results are particularly bad for President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, as the Amazon city of Belem is due to host the UN climate conference COP30 in November. It is also the state of Para (north), of which Belem is the capital, which suffered the most from the fires in 2024, with 7.3 million hectares devastated, around a quarter of the national total.

Left-wing leader Lula has made environmental protection one of the priorities of his mandate. Deforestation had also fallen by more than 30% year-on-year as of August, according to official statistics, a nine-year low.

In September, however, he admitted that Brazil was not “100% ready” to fight against a wave of forest fires, which the government blamed on “climate terrorism”. Some practice burning to clear fields intended for crops or livestock, or set fire to areas of forest to illegally appropriate land.

“The impacts of this devastation underline the urgency of acting (…) to contain an environmental crisis exacerbated by extreme climatic conditions, but triggered by human action, as was the case last year,” insisted Ane Alencar.

At COP30, Brazil will have the difficult task of trying to lead progress towards the goals of the Paris Agreement, as new US President Donald Trump has announced that the United States will once again withdraw from it .

The main goal of the Paris Agreement is to “keep the increase in global average temperature well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels”, with an eventual goal of “to 1.5°C”, according to the COP.