South America is experiencing its worst forest fire season in nearly two decades, with millions of hectares burning across several countries. The flames come amid the region’s worst drought on record, and are no surprise to climate scientists who have seen it coming for decades.
Satellite identified data analyzed by Brazil’s space research agency INPE a record-breaking 346,112 hotspots so far this year in the 13 countries of South America. All that smoke chokes large parts of the continent so thoroughly that NASA satellites captured the plumes from 1 million miles away.
In Brazil, the continent’s largest country, about 59 percent of the country is facing drought conditions — an area about half the size of the United States — and Amazon basin rivers are flowing at historic lows. Three of the six vast ecosystems that define the country – the Amazon, the Cerrado and the Pantanal wetlands – are parched and burning.
“We are facing one of the worst droughts in history,” said Ane Alencar, director of science at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute. The fires, she said, are the most extreme since 2005 and will continue until the rains come, which is typically in October — but no longer a guarantee. “We don’t know if rain will come.”
The proximate causes of the ongoing carnage are intentional fires that escape into the forest, and the natural El Niño weather pattern that creates dry conditions. But experts say the compounding effects of climate change are making the crisis much worse, and the effects are consistent with what scientists have warned could become the norm.
“This is exactly what all the climate models have been predicting for 20 years or more,” said Steve Schwartzman, senior director of forest policy at the Environmental Protection Fund. Erika De Berenguer Cesar, a tropical forest ecologist at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, worries that in the absence of dramatic action, people may one day look back on 2024 as a typical year. “It’s going to get much, much worse.”
Scientists say which is a warming planet already more of a factor than El Niño in the ongoing drought. And according to the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changeseasonal droughts in the region “are projected to lengthen by 12 to 30 percent, intensify by 17 to 42 percent, and increase in frequency by 21 to 42 percent” by the end of the century.
Drier weather means drier forests – and when farmers or ranchers start fires to clear land, they are more likely to lose control of it. While Alencar notes that indigenous communities have used small-scale fires to manage land for centuries, the forest was humid enough to largely contain it. Climate change has changed that reality, she said, making it so that “any human-caused fire activity can actually have a big impact.”
Deforestation is now a major driver of forest fires, especially in the Amazon. Clearing the land not only creates more opportunities for fire to spread, but the loss of the Amazon, which spans 2.5 million square miles, means the loss of a critical carbon sink for planet-warming emissions. This further deepens the climate changes that exacerbate fire risks.
“It seems to me that things are getting worse, year after year after year,” said Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on a recent trip to the drought-stricken state of Amazonaswhere all 62 municipalities have declared a state of emergency. More than 340,000 people are believed to have been affected.
Lula’s government took office in 2023 with a promise to combat illegal deforestation of the Amazon, which had reached unprecedented heights under his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro. Although deforestation has dropped dramaticallythe rainforest continues to dwindle as people continue to set fires that have spread.
This largely human-induced providence is one way the Amazonian fires differ from those raging in other parts of the world, such as the American West. Another distinction is the biological scale of what’s at stake: The Amazon is home to 10 percent of the world’s biodiversity and one-fifth of its fresh water, and it was never intended to burn.
“They have never burned, they have never coexisted with fire,” Guillermo Villalobos, a political scientist who focuses on climate science at the Bolivian nonprofit Fundación Solon, told ABC News. “It’s terribly tragic for the ecosystem and the world.”
