By Ana Ionova
Brazil is still weeks away from its traditional fire season, but hundreds of blazes, fanned by searing temperatures, are already laying waste to the Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetlands, and to parts of the Amazon rainforest.
Scientists say the burning of such vast swaths of land may represent a new normal under rising global temperatures and uneven rain, making efforts to save some of the world’s most important ecosystems much harder.
There were more wildfires in Brazil’s share of the Pantanal, an enormous trove of biodiversity stretching across three countries, between January and June than during the same period in any other year, according to the National Institute for Space Research, which has been tracking fires in Brazil since 1998.
The highest number of fires in at least two decades was also recorded in the Amazon and in the Cerrado savanna, a patchwork of shrubs, grasslands and gnarled trees encompassing 1.2 million square miles in Brazil’s central and northeastern regions.
“It’s really worrying this early on,” said Ane Alencar, science director at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute in Brazil. Fires at this scale, she said, do not usually occur until August or September, the peak fire months.
But extreme weather has caused fires recklessly ignited by people to quickly spread out of control, Alencar said, “creating the ideal conditions for any spark to become a wildfire.”
The Pantanal — parts of which are on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage sites — is more than 20 times the size of the Everglades. It sprawls across the borders dividing Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay, with about 80% of it contained in Brazil.
This year’s fires have scorched about 5% of the Brazilian Pantanal, an area roughly the size of Phoenix. And experts say the wetlands may be on course for a fire season worse than the one in 2020, when enormous blazes burned a third of the Pantanal and killed 17 million animals.
Hundreds of fires are also engulfing parts of the Amazon rainforest, a crucial buffer against climate change because it captures and stores huge amounts of heat-trapping gases. In May alone, flames engulfed nearly 500,000 acres of the Amazon, data shows.
Scientists say the extreme conditions fueling the fires are the result of climate change. In Brazil, like elsewhere in the world, average temperatures are rising, paving the way for more drought. In parts of the Amazon, the dry season is now a month longer than in the 1970s, research shows.
“The climate has already changed,” said Lincoln Muniz Alves, a climatologist at the National Institute for Space Research. “So when we talk about the future, about climate change, we are no longer talking about 20 to 30 years from now.”
Researchers say most of the wildfires in the Pantanal started as small blazes set by farmers to allow new grass to grow on pastures that had become less productive. Some Indigenous and forest-dwelling communities also use fire to chase wild game out of the bush or scatter bees to collect their honey.
The heat and dry conditions in the Pantanal and the Amazon fed the fires, which have spread for miles and combined into megablazes.
In the Pantanal, fire brigades can spend days traveling by boat to reach distant fires, said Lt. Col. Tatiane Dias de Oliveira Inoue, head of operations for the military firefighter corps in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, which includes two-thirds of the Pantanal.
“Every fire in the Pantanal ends up turning into a huge wildfire because of this difficulty we have circulating around these huge areas,” she said. “It’s really a war battle.”
The flames have consumed grasslands, forest, cattle ranches and eco-farms that host tourists. The region is home to the world’s biggest parrot, the planet’s highest concentration of jaguars and endangered species such as the giant otter.
“There are certainly a lot of animals dying in these fires,” said Gustavo Figueiroa, a biologist and spokesperson for SOS Pantanal, a conservation nonprofit.
And the impacts on wildlife are piling up, as large-scale blazes become more frequent in the Pantanal. “We are losing one of the biggest sanctuaries of biodiversity in the world,” he said.
In the Amazon, deforestation, a common driver of fires, has sharply declined under Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has pledged to curb environmental destruction.
But farmers, ranchers and others illegally encroaching on the rainforest still routinely set fires. And although the blazes have decreased in number, they are spreading across larger areas, propelled by intense heat and the lingering effects of a punishing drought, according to Alencar.
“There are fewer sources of ignition,” she said. “But they end up burning out of control and generating very large wildfires that cause more damage.”
As the Amazon loses trees, thinning out the canopy, it is less able to shade vegetation from scorching sunlight and hold on to moisture. This has made the rainforest drier and more flammable, according to Erika Berenguer, a senior research associate at the University of Oxford and at Lancaster University.
“The forest is dry enough so that the fire, initially set by humans, is able to spread within the forest,” she said. “This is not something we saw in the past.”
In recent days, some blazes in the Pantanal have been brought under control, with the help of cooler temperatures and shifting winds. But another heat wave is expected soon, and new fires are starting in other areas of the Pantanal.
“Everything can change from one day to the next,” said Danielly Escher, press secretary for the state of Mato Grosso do Sul.
Experts expect that the Pantanal’s dry season, which has already begun, will last longer than usual and cause fires to rage for months.
Inoue said her team was bracing for a difficult fire season.
“The scenario we face is already critical,” she said. “And we’re preparing for worse.”
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