South America is experiencing its worst forest fire season in nearly two decades, with millions of acres burning across several countries. The blazes come amid the region’s worst drought on record, and are no surprise to climate scientists who have seen this coming for decades.
Satellite data analyzed by Brazil’s space research agency Inpe identified a record-breaking 346,112 fire hotspots so far this year in the 13 countries of South America. All that smoke is so thoroughly choking large swaths of the continent that NASA satellites captured the plumes from 1 million miles away.
In Brazil, the continent’s largest country, about 59% of the country is facing drought conditions — an area roughly half the size of the United States — and Amazon basin rivers are flowing at historic lows. Three of the six vast ecosystems that define the country — the Amazon, the Cerrado and the Pantanal wetlands — are parched and burning.
“We are facing one of the worst droughts in history,” said Ane Alencar, director of science at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute. The fires, she said, are the most extreme since 2005 and will continue until the rains come, which is typically in October but are no longer a guarantee. “We don’t know if rain is going to come.”
The proximate causes of the ongoing carnage are intentional fires that escape into the forest, and the naturally occurring El Nino weather pattern that is creating dry conditions. But experts say the compounding effects of climate change are making the crisis far worse, and the consequences are in line with what scientists have been warning could become the norm.
“This is exactly what all the climate models have been predicting for 20 years or more,” said Steve Schwartzman, senior director of forest policy at the Environmental Defense Fund. Erika De Berenguer Cesar, a tropical forest ecologist at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, worries that, absent dramatic action, people could one day look back at 2024 as a typical year. “It’s going to get much, much worse.”
Scientists say that a warming planet is already more of a factor than El Nino in the ongoing drought. And, according to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, seasonal droughts in the region “are projected to lengthen by 12 to 30%, intensify by 17 to 42%, and increase in frequency by 21 to 42%” by the end of the century.
Deforestation is now a major driver of forest fires, particularly in the Amazon. Not only does clearing the land create more opportunities for fire to spread, but losing the Amazon, which stretches across 2.5 million square miles, means losing a critical carbon sink for planet-warming emissions. That further deepens the climatic changes that are exacerbating fire risks.
This largely human-induced providence is one way that the Amazonian conflagrations differ from those raging in other parts of the world, such as the American West. Another distinction is the biological scale of what’s at stake: The Amazon is home to 10% of the world’s biodiversity and one-fifth of its fresh water, and it was never meant to burn.
“They’ve never burned, they’ve never coexisted with the fire,” Guillermo Villalobos, a political scientist focusing on climate science at Bolivian nonprofit Fundación Solon, told ABC News. “This is terribly tragic for the ecosystem and the world.”