So began the fires that ravaged the Amazon

With more than 74,000 fires recorded since January, according to data from the INPE (Portuguese acronym of the National Institute of Space Research of Brazil), Brazil is posting an 83% increase in wildfires compared with at last year.

This is the highest number of fires since records began in 2013.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Friday urged the Armed Forces to fight the record number of forest fires registered in the country, allowing the deployment of soldiers in nature reserves, indigenous lands and border areas of the country. region. Against the fire

This is the first effective step taken by the Bolsonaro government, which said last week without providing any evidence that environmental NGOs could be responsible for the fires.

Fire in more countries

But the fires in the Amazon have not been limited to Brazil, they also affect the Amazonian regions of Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru.

On Sunday, Bolivian President Evo Morales suspended his reelection campaign and declared himself ready to accept international aid to fight fires in the Chiquitania region in his country.

Until now, the leftist leader had hesitated to accept offers of badistance from the United States and some neighbors of Latin America.

Much of the province of Santa Cruz, a key agricultural region where more than a quarter of the population lives, is on fire.

But how was this situation reached in the Amazon? What caused these multiple fires that provoked an international wave of criticism of the environmental policy of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro?

Human actions

One of the causes that forest fires are generally attributed to is the dry season.

Brazilian Environment Minister Ricardo Salles said Wednesday on Twitter that "dry weather, wind and heat have caused an increase in fires across most of the country".

However, Alberto Setzer, a researcher at INPE, told Reuters: "There is nothing unnatural about the climate or rainfall in the Amazon region this year, which are only slightly below average ".

While the dry season creates favorable conditions for the use and spread of fire, "lighting a fire is the work of the man, deliberately or by accident".

What do we lose if we lose the Amazon?

Setzer refers to fires caused by farmers and peasants, who use llamas as a way to clean an area that they first cut off, in order to create space for their animals and plants.

These cleaned spaces are normally used in this area to raise livestock and grow soybeans.

"There is no natural fire in the Amazon.There are people who burn, which can worsen and ignite fires during the dry season," says the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, known as its acronym, IPAM.

Similarly, in Bolivia, environmental activist Jhanisse Daza told the BBC that a government decree pbaded in July allowed farmers to create fires in forests.

For Paulo Moutinho, a researcher at IPAM, the alarming increase of fires in the Brazilian Amazon is largely due to the progress of deforestation and not to the dry season (which, he said this year, did not provoke drought as intense as in recent years). above), as argued by the Bolsonaro Government.

In an interview with Reuters, Moutinho explained that lack of prevention is the main cause of fires that have deliberately started to clear an already deforested area to open roads or prepare land for cultivation "they are drier."

For his part, the Brazilian president went beyond the dry season to explain the cause of the fires and came to say, without presenting any evidence, that non-governmental organizations could have started the fires to undermine their authority

Correlation of deforestation by fire

A new survey by IPAM and the Federal University of Acre, Brazil, contradicts the government's explanation with convincing results.

According to the study, the number of fires in the Amazon is directly related to deforestation: the ten municipalities in the region with the most warnings about deforestation are those that have suffered the most from 39, fires of the year.

"The ten Amazonian municipalities with the highest number of fires are also the ones with the highest rate of deforestation, accounting for 37 percent of fires in 2019 and 43 percent of deforestation recorded to date. In July, "he said. the text.

"This concentration of forest fires in recently deforested and moderately dry areas is a strong indication of the intentional nature of these fires: the cleanliness of recently cleared areas," he adds.

As he explained to BBC Brazil, climatologist Carlos Nobre, this correlation was expected: normally, those who want to clear a forest area first remove the trees and, after a few months, burn it down. .

"The dynamic is as follows: they clear the forest, wait a few months for it to dry, then set it on fire, if you try to do it the next day, it will not burn because the vegetation is wet", explains -t it.

"It takes a few months to wait, then it catches fire, and always, every year, August and September are the months when the number of fires is the highest," says the researcher, who did his PhD at MIT , in the USA.

Similarly, climate change contributes to the problem. Although this is not the cause, it has made the jungle more vulnerable to flames, BBC News Jos Barlow, a professor of conservation science at Lancaster University in the UK, told BBC News.

"Only temperature rises, which already occur in the Amazon, make the jungle more flammable."

BBC