By Bruno Vander Velde
October 22, 2019
Ashes to action: 3 things we know about the Amazon fires
7 min
Here are three takeaways from our work.
Deforestation fueled the fires: Many of the fires occurred in areas that had been recently deforested.
Protected areas work: Most of the fires occurred outside the boundaries of the many protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon.
First go the trees, then comes the fire
August and September are typically “fire season” in the southern Amazon, when relatively drier conditions prevail, and farmers prepare to plant their crops. This year’s fires were set mostly on private lands, and mostly for the purposes of expanding production of soy and beef, two of Brazil’s main agricultural products.
“The process of deforestation in the [Brazilian] Amazon is mostly the same,” said Mauricio Bianco, vice president of Conservation International in Brazil. “First the big, valuable trees are taken out and are sold on the black market. Then the smaller trees are cleared and pasture put down, by burning the land.”
So, what was different about the Amazon fire season in 2019? The number of fires was up sharply from the previous year: 60 percent more fires this August than in August 2018, according to Daniela Raik, who leads Conservation International’s work across South America.
At least part of the reason for the spike in number and intensity of this year’s fire season, experts believe, is that more of the fires occurred in places that had been completely or partially deforested, drying these areas and enabling burning.
Video courtesy of Matthew Finer/Planet Labs Inc.
The time-lapse video above shows an area in Mato Grosso state in Brazil. The first frames show a mostly forested region in 2018; the ensuing frames show deforestation in May through August of 2019, and then fires to prepare the land for agriculture.
Protected areas work
Maps of the fires revealed a clear and undeniable trend: For the most part, Brazil’s protected areas (including indigenous lands) saw very few fires. In many cases, fire extent stopped right at their boundaries.
(Map courtesy of Esri)
In the above map of the Brazilian Amazon, red dots represent fire events in August and September 2019, as recorded by satellite data. Green and yellow shaded areas represent protected and indigenous territories. With some exceptions — particularly in the southern and eastern parts of the Amazon basin where much of the burning occurred — protected areas were unscathed.
“You can see it clearly — these protected areas acted almost as a barrier to the fires,” Bianco said.
Protected areas remain one of the most important tools for conservation, with enormous potential to protect against climate breakdown and the loss of wildlife — while enabling indigenous and local communities to continue to sustainably prosper from the benefits that nature provides. Conservation International has worked in the Amazon for decades to help establish more of these areas.
The problem: Protected areas are not forever.
The past few years have seen a wave of rollbacks in legal protections for protected areas, including in Brazil, research from Conservation International has shown.
“With this in mind, more forest loss due to fires could lead to more [of these] events.”
An ounce of prevention
Securing protected areas, then, is critical for preventing future fires.
“We are not in the business of putting fires out on the ground, but we are in the business of preventing fires,” Raik said. “So if we want to prevent the fires, we need to conserve the forests.”
A tool called Firecast, developed years ago by Conservation International, is helping to do that. Firecast, an open-access online platform, uses satellite observations to track ecosystem disturbances such as fires, fire risk conditions, deforestation and delivers that information to decision-makers.
“Early-warning systems like Firecast are just such a game-changer for South America because, unlike in the U.S., there are very little resources allocated to fight fires,” Tabor said. While the U.S. budgets billions of dollars a year to fight wildfires, where fires are a normal ecological phenomenon, fires do not naturally occur in the Amazon rainforest, and there is limited budget and equipment to fight them, Tabor says.
This makes it that much more critical to prevent fires by improving fire management, investing in early warning systems and preventing deforestation from taking place, she said.
The world is watching
Fire season is not new to the Amazon. The intensity of global attention to the fires this year, however, is.
Even in Brazil.
“I’ve never seen so much attention for the Amazon in Brazil,” Bianco said. “Never. Not even in 1992, when we had the [UN climate conference] in Rio.
“This year we had, for two straight weeks, in the media, on the covers of magazines, on the news on TV — everyone was talking about the Amazon.”
Outside Brazil, the reaction was just as intense, and has swiftly translated into action.
If 2019 is a turning point for the future of the Amazon, major questions remain: What effects will the global trade in soy and beef have on the Amazon? How secure are Brazil’s protected areas — and indigenous rights? Will the Leticia Pact stick?
Whatever happens, the fires and the attention they’ve galvanized provide “an incredible opportunity for groups like Conservation International to make a difference in the Amazon,” said Raik, “even under these very challenging times.”
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