Rain is scarce in the Amazon. Instead, mega fires rage.
By this time of year, rain should drench large areas of the Amazon rainforest. Instead, a punishing drought has kept the rain at bay, creating dry conditions for fires that have engulfed hundreds of square miles of rainforest that normally doesn’t burn.
The fires have turned the end of the dry season in the northern part of the giant rainforest into a crisis. Firefighters have struggled to control massive blazes that have sent choking smoke to cities across South America.
A record number of fires so far this year in the Amazon has also raised questions about what awaits the world’s largest tropical rainforest when the dry season begins in June in the much larger southern part of the jungle.
Last month, Venezuela, northern Brazil, Guyana and Suriname, which cover large parts of the northern Amazon, recorded the highest number of fires in February that year, according to US State Department figures. The Brazilian National Institute for Space Research, which has been monitoring fires in the rainforest for 25 years. Fires were also burning in Colombia’s Andean highlands, as well as in parts of that country’s Amazon region.
The fires in the Amazon, which extend into nine South American countries, are the result of an extreme drought fueled by climate change, experts say.
The region is feeling the effects of a natural weather phenomenon known as El Niño, which could worsen dry conditions, which have been exacerbated by extremely high temperatures this year.
That has made the rainforest more vulnerable to fast-spreading fires, said Ane Alencar, scientific director of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute in Brazil.
“The climate is making South America’s forests more flammable,” she said. “It creates opportunities for forest fires.”
As countries continue to burn fossil fuels and the planet reaches the highest average temperatures recorded by scientists, a grueling year of fires is expected around the world. Severe fires have already ravaged large parts of the United States and Australia, and a worse season is forecast for Canada, where more hectares burned last year than ever before.
Another year of devastating fires could be especially damaging in the Amazon, where large amounts of carbon dioxide are stored in trees and soil. It is also home to 10 percent of the plants, animals and other living organisms on our planet.
If deforestation, fires and climate change continue to worsen, large areas of forest could turn into grasslands or weakened ecosystems in the coming decades. That would trigger a collapse that could release up to 20 years’ worth of global carbon emissions into the atmosphere, scientists say, in a huge blow to the fight to curb climate change.
Once this tipping point is crossed, “it may be futile to try to do anything,” says Bernardo Flores, who studies ecosystem resilience at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil.
In January, wildfires burned nearly 4,000 square kilometers of the Brazilian Amazon, a nearly fourfold increase from the same month last year, according to Map biomesa collective of climate-focused nonprofits and research institutions.
In February, more than two-thirds of Brazil’s fires took place in Roraima, the country’s northernmost state. They have burned down homes and subsistence crops in several indigenous villages, creating a thick haze over rural areas and dangerous air quality in the state capital, Boa Vista.
As a result of the prolonged drought, vegetation in this part of the Amazon has become “flammable,” explained Dr. Alencar out. “Roraima looks like a barrel of gunpowder right now.”
Researchers say most of the fires sweeping through the region were initially started by farmers using the slash and burn method to grow new grass on degraded pastures or completely deforest recently deforested land.
Fueled by dry conditions and high temperatures, many of these fires grow out of control and spread miles beyond the area originally burned.
“Fires are contagious,” said Dr. Flores. “They change the ecosystem they pass through and increase the risk to adjacent areas, just like a virus.”
In Roraima, the fires have mainly burned areas within the Lavrado, a unique savannah-like region nestled in the Amazon, said Erika Berenguer, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford and the University of Lancaster.
This ecosystem, known for its wide-open grasslands and a rare population of wild horses, overlaps with several protected areas, including the indigenous Yanomami Reserve, where illegal mining and forest destruction have led to a humanitarian crisis.
After months of scant rainfall, the dense rainforest, which is usually too humid to catch fire, has also become more susceptible to flames.
In Roraima, the fires have now spread to protected forests and indigenous areas in the southern region of the state, according to Haron Xaud, professor at the Federal University of Roraima and researcher at Embrapa Roraima, an institute monitoring the fires.
While fires are common in the drier boreal forests of Canada and other parts of the Northern Hemisphere, they do not occur naturally in the much wetter Amazon rainforest. Tropical forests are not adapted to fires, Dr.
Some of the Amazon’s human-caused wildfires have become ‘megafires’ typically defined as fires that burn more than 100,000 hectares of land or that have an unusually significant effect on people and the environment. These types of fires, Dr. Flores said, will become more common as the planet warms and deforestation damages the Amazon’s ability to recover.
Environmental factors are already changing the Amazon. Dry seasons are getting longer and average rainfall during those periods, when rain decreases but does not stop completely, has already fallen by a third since the 1970s, Dr Berenguer said. That has made El Niños increasingly dangerous.
“If you put all these factors together, you have the conditions for a perfect storm – the perfect firestorm,” said Dr. Berenguer.
The fires in the Amazon have had a striking effect on CO2 emissions. In February, forest fires in Brazil and Venezuela emitted almost 10 million tons of carbon, the most ever recorded in the month and about as much as Switzerland emits in a year, according to European Commission data. Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.
The El Niño pattern should subside within a few months, bringing some calm to the Amazon.
But more devastating fires could break out if the parched ground does not receive enough rain in the crucial wetter months ahead, Dr Alencar said.
“The question is whether the forest can recover before the dry season, and whether the Amazon can recharge its batteries,” she said. “Now it all depends on the rain.”
Simon Posada contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia.