Fires are raging in a part of the world where you might not typically think they would thrive — the Amazon rainforest.
The rainforest, located in Brazil, just experienced the most fires it’s experienced during August since back in 2010. The government released that data on Sunday, showing that the country’s record drought the region has been experiencing has played a huge role in all these fires.
Thanks to the El Nino weather pattern, the rains that come to the region every year came late in 2013. In addition, they weren’t as strong as they normally are.
Combined with the intense effects that climate change is having on some parts of the world, El Nino left the Amazon rainforest extra vulnerable to the wildfires that are raging there now.
In just August, satellites spotted more than 38,000 hotspots for fires throughout the Amazon. According to Inpe, the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil, that number is more than double the number of fire hotpots from 2013 and the largest for any August since 2010.
The brutal August followed a July that also saw the number of fire hotspots surge to a high that hasn’t been seen in more than 20 years.
Fires in the Amazon rainforest typically spike in August and September. The data that was just released this past weekend shows the number of fires in the region, but it doesn’t speak to their intensity at all.
The biome is extremely wet and humid, and the fires that rage there typically start on cattle ranches. These are places where local people are converting parts of the jungle environment into open pastures so they can raise their cattle.
These open pastures are ripe for fires, especially at a time when the vegetation has become much drier and the air much warmer than it’s been in recent history. Once a fire starts there, it can spread very rapidly, burn for longer periods of time and burn much more intensely as well.
Deforestation has additionally contributed to the rainforest not being naturally as good at producing humidity and rain, which would help to stamp out the fires.
WWF-Brasil conservation specialist Helga Correa said recently that an initial assessment of the data from August that was completed last week found that the rainforest fires were driven by a three-headed monster — human actions, climate change and weather.
As she explained:
“The region where we detected concentrated smoke in August coincides with the so-called Arch of Deforestation, which includes the north of Rondonia, the south of Amazonas and the southwest of Para. This indicates that, in addition to climate change and El Nino, changes in land use produced by humans play a central role in the increase in fires.”
The Amazon is the largest rainforest in the world. It naturally absorbs more greenhouses gasses than any other tropical forest, which is why it’s so important to climate change.
In just the last 50 years, though, the Amazon has lost roughly one-fifth of its forest cover — a total of nearly 300,000 square miles, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
