Smoke from Amazon fires reaches neighboring countries

As the fire season intensifies in the Amazon and the Pantanal due to climate change, cities in ten Brazilian states have experienced episodes of smoke and deteriorating air quality.

Images from the Center for Weather Forecasting and Climate Studies reveal a concentration of carbon monoxide spanning from Brazil´s North region to the South and Southeast, extending over Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay. Last week, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) issued a health warning, advising necessary precautions in response to the situation.

Based on data from the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe), the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change issued a statement saying that in the Amazon biome, the states of Amazonas and Pará together account for over half (51.6%) of the fires recorded between January 1 and August 18, 2024. Since July 1, these two states have been responsible for 67.2 percent of the fires.

Affected area

According to the Environmental Satellite Applications Laboratory at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Lasa-UFRJ), fires have burned 3.2 million hectares of the Amazon this year, representing 0.77 percent of the biome. In the Pantanal, nearly 1.9 million hectares have been affected by fire, accounting for 12.5 percent of the biome's area.

The Lasa-UFRJ Alarm System has issued an extreme fire danger alert for the Paraguay Basin in the Pantanal. The report indicates that until next Thursday (Aug. 22), the region will experience weather conditions that will hinder firefighting efforts, even from the air, due to the rapid spread of the fires.

Responding to fires

Since June, a government-established situation room has been centralizing the federal response to fires across the country. In the Legal Amazon, BRL 405 million from the Amazon Fund has been allocated to support state fire brigade units. Additionally, an extraordinary credit of BRL 137.6 million has been released for the Pantanal, along with an additional BRL 13.4 million transferred to the Ministry of Integration and Regional Development for humanitarian aid and fighting forest fires.