Opinion – Latinoamérica21: Let’s put out the fires to contain climate change

One day in early August 2015, Yara de Paula, a resident of the Raimundo Irineu Serra Environmental Protection Area in the Brazilian state of Acre, arrived home with her newborn when the sky was already gray with soot. Within minutes, the fire was meters from her house.

To stop the smoke, she covered the cracks in the windows and doors with wet towels, while her husband contained the flames with buckets of water. Fortunately, the fire did not burn their house down, but since then, Yara and her daughter have been suffering from chronic asthmatic bronchitis.

This Amazon fire is not an isolated case. In June 2022, in the state of Acre alone, 196 km² of burned areas were mapped in already deforested areas, a number that has increased in recent years.

These fires in the Amazon have caused a huge increase in hospital admissions for respiratory problems. In fact, life expectancy in the western region of the Amazon is up to three years lower than that of people living in other parts of the country, even compared to large urban centers.

In addition to health problems, these fires not only lead to the loss of agricultural production, but also destroy more than 8,000 km² of forests a year, thus losing one of the greatest capacities to mitigate climate change: the carbon stock in the basin. from Amazon. In other words, the ability to store this greenhouse gas is lost. But there are also other impacts: these forests are depleted in terms of biodiversity and cannot fully recover in the long term.

A vicious cycle of catastrophic consequences

Fire and deforestation are wiping out the world’s largest rainforest. This is accelerating climate change, making the climate in this region drier and hotter, and making forests more vulnerable to fires. This has generated a vicious cycle, in which climate change makes tropical forests more vulnerable to fires, and fire, which is increasingly present, increases CO₂ emissions, which implies a worsening of climate change and the local and regional climate.

The records of fires in the Amazon break records year after year. Between 1985 and 2020, approximately 16% of the biome was burned. On average, more than 65,000 km² are burned per year in the Brazilian Amazon, an area larger than that of Costa Rica.

In addition, most of these fires reach native forests, which is surprising, considering that the Amazon is formed mostly by tropical forest where fires would hardly occur naturally, much less spread.

However, climate change has hit the region hard, and the temperature increase in some regions, such as the southwest of the Amazon, reaches 2.5ºC during the dry season months. In the eastern region, on the other hand, rainfall has decreased by more than 30% during the driest months of the year.

In addition, extreme droughts are increasingly frequent (this century, they have occurred every five years), causing larger areas of forest to burn, and what remains healthy becomes increasingly vulnerable to fires.

In the past, Brazil has shown that it is possible to reduce deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, mainly through the implementation, in 2004, of the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Amazon (PPCDAm).

However, it also demonstrated that progress on the environmental agenda is fragile and very susceptible to the political scenario. In fact, the setbacks of recent years have resulted in the highest rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon in 2021 in the last 15 years.

Forest fires contribute to the increase in CO₂

Of all the negative impacts, perhaps the most concerning is the contribution of forest fires to the increase in CO₂ in the atmosphere, which has a direct impact on climate change. Unlike deforestation, fire does not necessarily lead to changes in land use. The forest can burn and remain standing, but without the characteristics of a healthy forest and emitting carbon to the atmosphere for decades.

Another effect is that these forests decrease their ability to pump water into the atmosphere. This is an important part of the hydrological cycle, as it contributes to rain, which is essential for both agricultural areas in Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina, as well as for the generation of hydroelectric power.

This emission, which is not directly associated with deforestation, may represent an amount greater than half of that produced by deforestation of primary forests during drought years.

Therefore, the increasing susceptibility to fires generated by droughts and the projection of drier future conditions mean that carbon emissions in the Amazon are dominated by forest fires. Furthermore, as the environment becomes more flammable, the likelihood of intentional fires (traditionally used in a controlled manner by local communities) reaching adjacent forests increases.

Changing this trend is critical both to mitigate and to adapt to climate change on a global scale. But the search for solutions must take into account the main reasons that lead to the intense use of fires in the region: illegal deforestation and the maintenance of pastures.

Therefore, investing in resources to promote alternatives to the use of fire in agriculture is essential to prevent forest fires in the Amazon.

It is estimated that, on average, one third of the total area burned annually in the Amazon corresponds to agricultural areas. In the Brazilian Amazon, the vast majority of agricultural areas correspond to pasture areas managed with low technology and technical knowledge, which means that fire is often used to renew degraded pastures and, with this, the risks of forest fires increase.

In Brazil, the use of fire in agriculture is prohibited by law, except in cases of subsistence agriculture, and requires the approval of the environmental agency.

In 2020, despite the government having established a decree that prohibited its authorization by agencies for 120 days, fires remained at the high levels of 2019. This demonstrates that the use of fire in the region is mostly illegal and receives little oversight. Therefore, the fight against illegality must be aligned with the expansion of assistance to rural producers to promote sustainable practices that increase productivity in order to replace the use of fire.

Brazil must adopt urgent measures to break the vicious cycle where fire is turning the surroundings into its own fuel. The socio-economic and environmental repercussions of forest fires are wide, and, therefore, not changing this situation is going against what is expected of a nation committed to sustainable development.