Amazon has 2.5 mi hectares burned in August

In less than a month, fire has consumed 2.5 million hectares of the Amazon. The data were released by the Environmental Satellite Applications Laboratory of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Lasa-UFRJ). The historical average for the area affected by fire in a month is 1.4 million hectares.

Since the beginning of the year, the Amazon has had more than 4.1 million hectares affected by fires. Last week, monitoring carried out by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) detected a high concentration of polluting gases in a region stretching from the Amazon to the South of Brazil, encompassing ten states. River levels in the region are already forecasting extreme drought, which may become worse in September with the arrival of the most critical period of drought.

After an extraordinary meeting at the federal government’s situation room on Sunday (Aug. 25), Minister for the Environment and Climate Change Marina Silva said the fires in the Amazon, the pantanal, and the Southeast of the country have been intensified by the extreme weather conditions, but also show an atypical movement that could indicate criminal action by individuals starting fires deliberately.

“Just as we had ‘fire day,’ there is a strong suspicion that this is happening again. In the case of the pantanal, we were seeing the opening of ten fire outbreaks a week. In the case of the Amazon, we identified the same phenomenon. And in São Paulo, it's not natural under any circumstances to have so many hotpots involving several municipalities at once in just a few days,” she pointed out.

The event mentioned refers back to August 10–11, 2019, when INPE detected 1,457 hotspots in Pará state. At the time, federal prosecutors reported that farmers had been called in for an orchestrated action to set fire to the biome, in support of the dismantling of environmental policies.

According to Federal Police Director-General Andrei Rodrigues, in addition to the 29 inquiries opened in the Amazon and Pantanal, two more have been initiated in São Paulo to investigate evidence of arson affecting federal lands.