By Sarah Brown
The Amazon Rainforest continues to feel the effect of 2023’s severe drought that intensified the dry season, provoking blazes across vast regions of untouched vegetation. Fire outbreaks in these swaths of primary forest grew by 152% in 2023, according to a recent study, and record highs of wildfires continue to be registered this year across several Amazonian countries.
According to the research published in February in Global Change Biology, satellite images show that fire outbreaks in mature forest areas rose from 13,477 in 2022 to 34,012 in 2023. The increase in fires in old-growth forest highlights the challenges the Amazon continues to face, despite seeing a 22% drop in deforestation and 16% decrease in total fire counts in Brazil last year.
“Fires in mature forests can have serious consequences for the future of the Amazon,” Luiz Eduardo Oliveira e Cruz de Aragão, one of the study authors and the head of Brazil’s space research agency INPE’s Earth Observation and Geoinformatics Division, told Mongabay. “Fire degradation deals silent damage. While deforestation monitored daily by INPE finds a voice in the media, degradation by fire is little publicized.”
The wildfires in mature forests last year were the result of a combination of the fragmented and degraded environment in the Amazon and the extreme drought that occurred as a result of the natural weather phenomenon El Niño, Aragão said.
The river that supplies water in the Porto Praia community of the Kokama Indigenous people in Amazonas state almost completely dried up in 2023, practically isolating the population who depend on waterways to get around and collect supplies. Image © Marizilda Cruppe/Greenpeace.
Experts expect cooler temperatures and more rain in the Amazon region from May and June, which means “the occurrence of forest fires should be lower,” Aragão said. “But it is critical that deforestation and fires in deforested areas are controlled, as fires that reach mature forests are set by humans and originate in these areas. If deforestation or the use of fire increases significantly, even without droughts, we could have fires spreading through the Amazon forests.”
Brazilian states Amazonas and Pará felt the effects of droughts with soaring numbers of fires in 2023. In October alone, Pará registered 11,378 fires (an average of 367 fires per day), the highest number since the same month in 2008 and an increase of 52% from the previous year, according to data from INPE. In November, 8,188 fires were recorded compared with 4,507 in the same period in the previous year (an 82% jump), the highest since 2017.
The fires in Pará in 2023 tore across vast stretches of protected rainforest, scorching 2,592 square kilometers (1,000 square miles) of vegetation in the Tapajós National Forest and the Tapajós-Arapiuns Extractive Reserve, sending plumes of eye-stinging smoke over hundreds of kilometers of the west of the state.
Over in neighboring Amazonas, 3,858 fires blazed across the state in October, an all-time record for the month since records began in 1998, and double the number of fires in the same period in the year before, according to INPE. The smoke from the fires was so bad that on Oct. 11, Manaus was one of the cities with the worst air quality in the world. Its PM2.5 (tiny particles in the air that are 2.5 microns or less wide) content was 314.99 micrograms per cubic meter of air (µg/m³); the maximum value considered acceptable by the World Health Organization is 15 µg/m³.
A 2023 fire in a recently deforested forest in the state of Amazonas. Image © Marizilda Cruppe/Greenpeace.
New year, new flames
The number of fires across the Amazon this year continues to rise, with several regions and countries registering all-time highs.
In the first quarter of 2024, the Brazilian Amazon registered 7,860 fires, the highest in this period since 2016 and representing more than half (54%) of all the fire records in the country. From January to March, wildfires burned more than 26,369 km2 (10,181 mi2) 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.
The state of Roraima in Brazil has been hit by a series of record fires so far this year. In February, the state registered an all-time high of 2,057 blaze outbreaks and by March, 14 of its 15 municipalities declared an emergency due to unprecedented fires. Almost a quarter of the fires in Roraima are in Indigenous areas, affecting at least 13 territories, including the Yanomami, which is still reeling from a major humanitarian health crisis.
In February, Guyana, Suriname and Venezuela, all of which contain great swaths of northern Amazon Rainforest, registered the highest number of fires for any February on record, according to INPE. Suriname, for example, registered 222 fires compared with just three in the same month of 2023, and in March, it recorded 224 fires; the highest recorded for this month previously had been in 2003 at 112 fires.
Guyana also had all-time-high numbers of fires for five consecutive months at the end of last year. Venezuela has been battling a record high of outbreaks in January, February and March, with INPE registering 30,188 fires in the country in this period, the highest level for that period since records began in 1999. In Colombia, more than 500 fires have ripped across the country, including its highland wetlands, which are one of the fastest-evolving ecosystems on the planet.
The north of the Amazon has a later dry season compared with the central-southern Amazon, and “this is why the north of the basin is currently burning,” Bernardo Flores, a scientist in ecosystem resilience at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, told Mongabay. “If El Niño continues affecting the region, once we enter the 2024 dry season along the southern Amazon, where the Arc of Deforestation is located, during August and September, we may witness even worse forest fires.”
A forest fire near the Tefé River, dry to the 2023 severe drought, in the Amazonas state. Image © Marizilda Cruppe/Greenpeace.
Transforming the ecosystem
The study found that approximately 43% of fires detected in the Brazilian Amazon since August 2019 are related to deforestation. The rest include forest wildfires, created accidentally by people from uncontrolled small fires linked to crop burning, livestock management or clear-cutting.
“Forest fires are the most concerning fire type because they spread across standing forest, causing degradation that may compromise burnt forests persistently,” Flores said. “When a tropical forest burns, it becomes more flammable and more likely to burn again. As a result, forest fires may spread persistent shifts in the ecosystem, particularly during extreme drought events that allow forest fires to spread across huge areas.”
The Amazon has its own built-in protection against fire: its ability to create “a moist sub-canopy microclimate” that keeps moisture within the environment, according to researchers. However, losing mature, old-growth forests means the resilience of the ecosystem weakens and its capacity to contain and recycle moisture becomes compromised, causing the environment to dry out.
This poses a challenge for traditional farmers who use controlled fires to manage subsistence areas and now face increasing risk of their managed fires escaping. They “are also first in line when their forests and the foods, medicines and resources within them are impaired by invasive fires,” according to the study.
As well as intensifying the process of degradation of the Amazon biome, fires in old-growth forests have far-reaching carbon impacts. Not only do they decrease the forest’s capacity to absorb carbon due to the destruction of older trees, they also release huge stores of carbon into the air.
“Forest wildfires have potential to greatly reduce carbon stocks in the Amazon [in] the long-term and, thus, impact the global carbon cycle,” according to the study.
In February, wildfires in just Brazil and Venezuela alone emitted more than 9 million tons of carbon, the most ever recorded for the month, according to data from Europe’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. It’s the equivalent of the carbon emissions of Honduras in one year.
The researchers in the study suggest that to help alleviate the devastation of fires in the Amazon, it’s essential to increase command and control operations, expand fire brigades and develop monitoring systems that can help predict sites of possible future fires. Implementing these measures could be critical to maintaining the Amazon Rainforest and avoiding an ecological breakdown.
“These repeatedly burnt forests are completely different from unburnt ones. Tree species are different, often the species that tolerate fire are the ones that remain, making these forests poorer in biodiversity,” Flores said. “If invasive exotic grasses [the type commonly used for pasture] are able to penetrate these burnt forests, the ecosystem becomes even more vulnerable.”
“The more these areas expand across the Amazon, the closer we get to a large-scale tipping point,” he added.
Banner image: Fires in the state of Amazonas in 2023. Record droughts sparked fires and smoke plumes, polluting the state’s major urban areas. Image © Marizilda Cruppe/Greenpeace.
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This article was originally published on Mongabay
