The images went around the world. Last September, in Brazil, the smoke from the fires which then ravaged the Amazon, the Cerrado savannah and the Pantanal wetland spread over more than half of the territory, enveloping several large cities, including the megalopolis São Paulo .
If vegetation fires are a recurring scourge in Brazil, the year 2024 was marked by a sharp increase in fires: the burned area reached 30.8 million hectares, an increase of 79% compared to the previous year. previous year, according to the report published Wednesday January 22 by MapBiomas, the monitoring platform of the Climate Observatory, a collective of environmental NGOs and universities.
This area, equivalent to the territory of Italy, “is the largest recorded since 2019, when the project’s historic series begins,” underlines Folha de São Paulo. 73% of devastated areas correspond to native flora.
-For Mapbiomas, these figures “reflect the effects of a long period of drought in the country in 2024”, but also the formation of the natural climatic phenomenon El Niño, “which lasted from June 2023 to June 2024”, sums up everyday life. This phenomenon “can cause periods of above-average drought and heat across the continent and increases the risk of extreme weather events.”
The largest ecosystem in the country, the Amazon has been the most affected, with 17.9 million hectares burned in 2024, the largest area devastated by fires in the last six years.
