In August 2019, the number of fires in the Brazilian Amazon skyrocketed, making international headlines and prompting protests in cities like London, Paris and Toronto. While the global community was shocked by images of burning trees and animals, in Brazil, the arrival of the smoke in the country’s business capital and largest city, São Paulo, made the urban population suddenly wake up to the problem. The crisis also drew the attention of the scientific community, which has since invested more effort into creating tools and data to understand the dynamics of fire in the Amazon, a biome not naturally adapted to burning. “All this caused a stir among researchers, who began to ask themselves, ‘What is going on?’” Manoela Machado, a researcher with the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, told Mongabay. Fire doesn’t occur naturally in the Amazon, unlike in the Cerrado, the vast Brazilian savanna, or the forests of California. In the rainforest, it takes human action to start and spread fires, and as such, burning is usually associated with the final step in the deforestation process: once chainsaws and tractors have done their work of felling trees and clearing vegetation, deforesters set fires to burn all the remaining trunks, roots and vines. Ranchers also use fire to renew cattle pastures, especially in areas with low-quality grass and no access to modern farming techniques. Using fire to clear land is legal in Brazil, but farmers and ranchers must have authorization from state environmental regulators to use…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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