dpa
Rio de Janeiro
An area comparable to size of Belarus burned in Brazil between January and September 2024, according to a report published on Saturday.
A total of 22.38 million hectares caught fire in the first nine months of 2024, an increase of 150% compared to the same period in 2023, the MapBiomas initiative report said. The area corresponds to about 2.6% of Brazil’s land area, is larger than Belarus (20.29 million hectares) and nearly the size of Romania (23 million hectares).
For the report, the network comprising universities, non-governmental organizations and tech companies, analysed satellite images and other data.
More than half of the area burned was in the Amazon region. In September alone, 5.5 million hectares burned there - a jump of 196% compared to the same month in 2023.
"The dry season in the Amazon, which normally lasts from June to October, was particularly severe this year and further exacerbated the fire crisis in the region,” said Ane Alencar of MapBiomas.
Dubbed "the lungs of the planet,” the Amazon rainforest absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, playing a key role in fighting climate change.
In September, the Cerrado, Brazil’s water reservoir and home to around 5% of all plant and animal species on Earth, was the biome most affected by fires in terms of area, with 4.3 million hectares.
There was a 158% increase in the area affected compared to the same month last year.
In September, almost 318,000 hectares of the Pantanal, the largest wetland in the world, were destroyed by fire - a 662% increase compared to the same month last year.
According to data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE), which is responsible for satellite monitoring, the South American country has seen the worst fires in 14 years since the beginning of the year.
In the Amazon and Cerrado wildfires are historically seen as the final stage of deforestation, since fire is used to "clear” devastated areas, environmental group WWF Brazil said in September.
However the majority of the areas affected by fires the previous two months did not occur in recently deforested areas, but in areas of primary forest.
"The record number of hotspots detected in August in the Amazon had an uneven distribution, with more than half of them concentrated in areas of primary native vegetation and only 13% in recently deforested areas,” said WWF Brazil’s Mariana Napolitano.
"The combination of climate change caused by global warming with environmental degradation has created a favourable scenario to the criminal use of fire for a forest conversion that will probably be detected in future mappings of the devastated area in the Brazilian Amazon,” Napolitano said.