South American countries registered 511,575 fire outbreaks in 2024, the highest number since 2010. Brazil accounted for 54% of them, according to the country’s space agency, INPE, with fires mainly hitting the Amazon Rainforest, but also the Pantanal wetlands, the Cerrado savanna, and the country’s most populous state, São Paulo. The smoke spread through 10 of Brazil’s 26 states, impacting air quality and air traffic. “The fires took on a tragedy dimension in 2024,” Suely Araújo, a senior public policy adviser at the civil society coalition Climate Observatory, told Mongabay. “It’s important to understand the causes well enough to ensure that it won’t happen again this year.” The outbreaks were fueled by an extreme drought that hit the Amazon in 2023 and 2024. Rainfall in the biome started diminishing in 2023 due to El Niño, the abnormal warming of the surface waters of the equatorial Pacific Ocean. The two intense dry seasons saw water levels in the Amazonian rivers drop to record lows and created the perfect conditions for burning. “The landscape became very dry, with many fallen leaves accumulating flammable material on the ground,” Ane Alencar, director of science at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM), told Mongabay. The record of fires in 2024 happened despite a 30% decrease in deforestation rates, contradicting previous assumptions that fires are directly related to forest destruction; historically, deforesters set fires to burn the remains of trunks and branches before growing pasture. The historic drought that ravaged Brazil in 2024 saw water levels…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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