Fires in Brazil destroyed a wilderness area larger than Guangdong and Fujian combined in 2024, with the burned area surging 79 percent from the previous year amid the country’s worst drought on record, the Guardian reports.
Recorded by Fire Monitor, a satellite and machine learning project that has tracked Brazil’s burn scars since 2019, the data mark the worst year on record. The Amazon suffered the most among Brazil’s six biomes – major regional biological communities – accounting for 58 percent of the burned area. For the first time, forest fires surpassed those in grasslands and pastures, with the Amazon’s scorched land exceeding the total burned nationwide in 2023.
“It was an absurd increase,” Ane Alencar, coordinator of MapBiomas, told the Guardian. Forests, she warned, take far longer to recover from fire than other biomes. “If there’s another drought and that forest isn’t protected, it will burn again.”
[See more: Deforestation is down by nearly 31 percent in the Brazilian Amazon]
Researchers attribute the surge in wildfires to two factors: Brazil’s worst drought on record between 2023 and 2024, fuelled by an unusually strong El Niño, and human activity. El Niño raised temperatures and shifted rainfall southward, turning biomes like the Amazon, Pantanal wetlands and Cerrado grasslands into tinderboxes. Meanwhile, agricultural practices, such as clearing fields using manmade fires, and deforestation worsened the problem. Although deforestation has decreased significantly under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, it persists.
At the peak of the fires in September, speculation arose that the blazes may have been a criminal backlash against Lula’s crackdown on deforestation and illegal mining. Arson investigations increased around 70 percent in 2024, with 119 cases opened compared to an average of 70 in previous years.
Alencar warned that 2025 could see a similar scenario. “We would need a very strong rainy season to truly replenish the soil, and that hasn’t happened yet,” she told the Guardian.
A weak La Niña, which often brings wetter conditions to the Amazon and cools global temperatures, began in late December and could last until April, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Still, one expert interviewed by conservation news outlet Mongabay cautioned that 2025 will be “a hot year compared to recent decades because countries are still emitting huge amounts of planet-warming greenhouse gases.”
