Megafires in the Amazon Accelerate the Risk of Biome Collapse

Increase in fires in native forest areas and extreme drought could lead to an irreversible situation

Sep.20.2024 1:11PM

A fire that began on August 8 has already burned over 67,000 hectares in the Kayapó Indigenous Land, in the Xingu region of Pará. The data comes from the Servir-Amazonia program, run by NASA, which monitors the region via satellites. The size of the megafire is equivalent to that of Florianópolis and is just one of several fire fronts in the Amazon.

The classification "megafire" is used for fires exceeding 10,000 hectares —something that is becoming increasingly common. "We are not just entering the era of fire but the era of megafires. It's quite catastrophic," says Erika Berenguer, a senior scientist at the University of Oxford.



Megafires in the Amazon accelerate the risk of biome collapse. - Marizilda Cruppe/Greenpeace Brasil/Divulgação

The researcher notes that the first megafire in Brazil was detected in Roraima in 1998, during an El Niño year, just like 2023 and 2024 —this El Niño being one of the five strongest ever recorded. The phenomenon reduces rainfall in the Amazon and is amplified by climate change. "In a normal climate, the forest shouldn't be burning. It's very humid, and the fire would naturally die out. But the literature shows that, across the Amazon as a whole, temperatures have already risen by 1.5°C compared to the 1970s," explains the biologist, a reference in studies on the impact of fire on tropical forests.

From January to August 2024, more than 1.77 million hectares of forest burned in the Brazilian Amazon, according to MapBiomas. This number represents about 33% of the total area affected in the biome during this period —another 38% of burned areas are agricultural land, mostly pasture, and 30% are non-forest native vegetation.

https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/scienceandhealth/2024/09/megafires-in-the-amazon-accelerate-the-risk-of-biome-collapse.shtml