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,…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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