Fires in mature Amazon forests grew 152% – 04/10/2024 – Environment

Even with the reduction in deforestation in the Amazon in 2023, the biome is facing another challenge: fires in areas of native vegetation not yet affected by deforestation.

A study published in the scientific journal Global Change Biology warns that fires in areas of so-called mature forests grew 152% last year compared to 2022, while there was a 16% drop in the total number of fires in the biome and a 22% reduction in deforestation.

By breaking down the satellite images, the researchers detected that outbreaks in forest areas rose from 13,477 to 34,012 in the period.

The main cause is droughts in the Amazon, which are increasingly frequent and intense. In addition to the prolonged events recorded in 2010 and 2015-2016, which make the forest more flammable and cause vegetation fragmentation, the biome is going through a new drought in the 2023-2024 biennium, which further worsens the situation.

So much so that the Queimadas program, from Inpe (National Institute for Space Research), points out that the total number of hot spots in the first quarter of 2024 throughout the Amazon was the highest in the last eight years — 7,861 records between January and March, representing more 50% of notifications in the country (the cerrado comes next, with 25%).

The highest number so far was in the first quarter of 2016 — 8,240 for the biome as a whole.

“It is important to understand where the fires are occurring because each of these affected areas requires a different response”, says remote sensing specialist and corresponding author of the article Guilherme Augusto Verola Mataveli, from Inpe’s Earth Observation and Geoinformatics Division.

“When we analyzed the data, we saw that mature forests burned more than in previous years. This is particularly worrying not only because of the loss of vegetation and deforestation that followed, but also because of the emission of stored carbon.”

Mataveli is currently at the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, in the United Kingdom, where he is developing part of his post-doctorate on greenhouse gas emissions from fires with the support of Fapesp, which also finances the work through four other projects.

Last year, some researchers from the group published another work showing an increase in fires in an emerging deforestation frontier in southwestern Amazonas, in the Boca do Acre region, between 2003 and 2019.

“In addition to the severity of fires in areas of mature forests that affect, for example, older trees, with greater carbon stock potential, contributing to the increase in the impact of climate change, there is damage to local populations. Manaus is one of these cases, which was the second city with the worst air quality in the world in October last year”, adds Mataveli.

Other states recorded a similar situation, including Pará, where the count of hot spots in mature forests in 2023 was 13,804 — compared to 4,217 in 2022.

In the year 2024, one of the worst situations is in Roraima, which contains more than half of the biome’s records.

With the fifth largest indigenous population in the country —97,320 people—, the state saw 14 of its 15 municipalities declare an emergency in March because of the fire. The smoke led to the suspension of classes and the severe drought has affected indigenous communities, leaving them without access to food and exposed to respiratory diseases, among other impacts.

Ibama/Prevfogo says that it has been working, since November last year, together with other institutions to prevent and combat fires, currently concentrated in different regions of Roraima. According to the organization, since January, there have been more than 300 fighters, in addition to four aircraft supporting the work.

“Climate change is identified as a critical factor in the increase in fire episodes, with El Niño as an aggregating risk factor due to its relationship with prolonged drought in the region”, informs Ibama/Prevfogo in response to Agência Fapesp.

“We emphasize the importance of the work of state and municipal environmental agencies in fighting fires, in collaboration with federal entities. This partnership is essential to allow for more strategic and effective action in preventing and combating forest fires.”

Contacted by the report, the MMA (Ministry of the Environment) reinforced in a note the points highlighted by Ibama.

Resilience

Fire-induced tree mortality in forest areas often exceeds 50% of above-ground biomass, meaning fires have the potential to significantly reduce carbon stocks especially in the long term.

This year, this effect has already been felt. In February, emissions from fires in Brazil broke a record, reaching the highest level in 20 years — 4.1 megatonnes (each megatonne is equivalent to 1 million tons) of carbon, leveraged by Roraima, according to the European climate and atmospheric observatory Copernicus .

Furthermore, the resilience of the forest is compromised, affecting, among others, its ability to create a humid microclimate below the tree canopy to contain and recycle moisture within the ecosystem.

Another point highlighted by the researchers is that the growing flammability of the forest becomes a challenge for traditional farmers — they normally use controlled fire as a way of managing subsistence areas. This requires encouraging production chains to be free from this practice.

Leader of the group and co-author of the article, researcher Luiz Aragão highlights that, “as time passes without effective solutions to the problem of fire in the Amazon region, the biome becomes more vulnerable, with environmental, social and economic impacts.” Aragão explains that, even though deforestation rates are reducing, the area impacted by this process continues to grow.

“We had already predicted this in 2010 in a publication by our group in the journal Science. Both areas already deforested and those in the process of forest removal constitute active sources of fire ignition by man. As deforestation fragments the landscape, creating more edges between forests and open areas, mature forests are more permeable to fire”, assesses Aragão.

“Adding extreme droughts, such as the current one, to the configuration of the fragmented landscape, the continued use of fire in the region and the presence of more degraded forest areas, due to past fires, illegal logging and edge effects, a forest increasingly flammable. Urgent measures are needed to mitigate the fires and maintain the Amazon as the country’s greatest asset to achieve sustainable national development.”

The group also suggests increasing command and control operations and expanding fire brigades, in addition to the constant development of monitoring systems.

“With the use of artificial intelligence, we can try to develop systems that, in addition to showing where fires occurred, make a prediction of the places most likely to occur and thus have more specific areas as a focus for prevention”, adds Mataveli.

The scientific article can be read here (in English).