If deforestation and mismanaged forest clearing by fire continues, Lovejoy and Muelbert warn that wildfires of this scale could continue. That’s why, he says, “the Amazon has to be managed as a system.” What do these fires have to do with climate change? “The Amazon has this tipping point because it makes half of its own rainfall,” says Lovejoy. Experts worry that this downward spiral could increasingly dry out the forest and push it to a point of no return, where it more resembles savannah than rainforest. Much of the rain in the Amazon is generated by the rainforest itself, but as trees disappear, rainfall declines.
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Lovejoy describes a cyclical system in which deforestation fuels forest loss, making the region drier, spurring even more deforestation. Like the wildfires that plague California, most are started by humans, but then spiral out of control. Burning is commonly used to clear trees quickly. In addition to harvesting timber, many trees in the Amazon are cleared to plant soy or make way for lucrative cattle pastures. “That leads us to think that this is deforestation-driven fire,” she says. “In the previous years were very much related to the lack of rain, but it has been quite moist this year,” says Adriane Muelbert, an ecologist who’s studied how Amazon deforestation plays a role in climate change. A major part of his campaign message called for opening up the Amazon for business, and since he’s been in power, he’s done just that.ĭata released by INPE earlier this month indicated that more forest has been cleared in Brazil this summer alone than in the last three years combined. How is this related to Brazil’s pro-business environmental policies?Įnvironmentalists have been raising the alarm about deforestation since the country’s current president Jair Bolsonaro was elected in 2018. “There’s no question that it’s a consequence of the recent uptick in deforestation,“ he says. “This is without any question one of only two times that there have been fires like this,” in the Amazon, says Thomas Lovejoy, an ecologist and National Geographic Explorer-at-Large. On August 11, NASA noted that the fires were large enough that they could be spotted from space. The size of the fires is still unclear, but they spread over several large Amazon states in northwest Brazil. More than 9,000 of those fires have been spotted in the past week. Multiple news outlets are reporting that Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) reported a record 72,843 fires this year, an 80 percent increase from last year.
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Wildfires are currently burning so intensely in the Amazon rainforest that smoke from the blaze has covered nearby cities in a dark haze.