Fires have ravaged South America, from Brazil’s Amazon rainforest to the world’s largest wetland and Bolivia’s dry forests, shattering previous records for the number of fires in a single year through September 11.
A total of 346,112 fire hotspots have been recorded across 13 South American countries so far this year, according to satellite data analysed by Brazilian space research agency Inpe, far surpassing the 2007 record of 345,322 hotspots in a data series that began in 1998.
Drone footage shows fire burning vegetation in the Amazon rainforest in Apuí, Brazil’s Amazonas state.
A Reuters photographer traveling in Brazil’s Amazon region this week saw massive fires burning in vegetation along roads, blackening the landscape and leaving trees like burnt-out matchsticks.
Smoke from fires in Brazil has darkened skies over cities such as Sao Paulo, with a corridor of wildfire smoke visible from space stretching from Colombia in the northwest to Uruguay in the southeast.
Smoke rises from a fire in the Amazon rainforest in Apuí, Amazonas state, Brazil.
Brazil and Bolivia have sent thousands of firefighters to battle the blazes, but they are largely at the mercy of extreme weather that is fueling the fires.
Scientists say that although most fires are started by humans, recent warmer and drier conditions caused by climate change are helping fires spread more quickly. Several heat waves have occurred in South America over the past year.
“We’ve never had a winter like this. It’s absurd,” Carla Longo, an air quality researcher at Inpe, said of São Paulo’s weather in recent months.
Despite it still being winter in the Southern Hemisphere, high temperatures in São Paulo have remained above 32 degrees Celsius (90 degrees Fahrenheit) since Saturday.
A tree burns during a fire in the Amazon rainforest in Apuí, Amazonas state, Brazil.
Hundreds of people marched in Bolivia’s political capital, La Paz, to demand action against the fires, carrying banners and placards that read “Bolivia is in flames” and “Stop burning for clean air.”
“Please understand what is really happening in the country, we have lost millions of hectares of land,” said Fernanda Negron, an animal rights activist who was part of the protest. “Millions of animals have burned to death.”
The drought that began last year in Brazil has become its worst ever, according to national disaster monitoring agency Semaden.
“In general, the 2023-2024 drought will be the most intense, the longest-lasting in some areas, and the most widespread in recent history, at least in data since 1950,” said Ana Paula Cunha, a drought researcher at Cimaden.
According to Inpe data, Brazil and Bolivia have seen the most fires this month, followed by Peru, Argentina and Paraguay. Earlier this year, unusually intense fires in Venezuela, Guyana and Colombia broke records but have now subsided considerably.
Fires caused by deforestation in the Amazon produce particularly intense smoke, Longo said, because so much of the vegetation is burned.
“The feeling you get when flying near one of these is similar to a nuclear mushroom cloud,” said INP’s Longo.
Drone view shows smoke rising from an Amazon forest fire over Brazil’s Trans-Amazonian Highway BR230.
He said about 9 million square kilometers (3.5 million square miles) of South America, more than half the continent, is sometimes blanketed by smoke.
Sao Paulo, the most populous city in the Western Hemisphere, had the worst air quality worldwide earlier this week, even higher than well-known pollution hotspots such as China and India, according to the website IQAir.com. Bolivia’s capital, La Paz, was similarly blanketed in smoke.
Longo said exposure to smoke would increase the number of people seeking hospital treatment for respiratory problems and could lead to thousands of premature deaths.
Wildfire smoke causes an average of 12,000 premature deaths per year in South America, according to a 2023 study published in the academic journal Environmental Research: Health.
September is typically the biggest month for fires in South America. It’s unclear whether the continent will see a high incidence of fires this year as well.
Although rain is forecast next week in Brazil’s central-south region, where Sao Paulo is located, drought conditions are expected to continue in Brazil’s northern Amazon region and central-western agricultural region until October.
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