A continent ablaze: South America surpasses record for fires

SAO PAULO – South America is being ravaged by fire from Brazil’s Amazon rainforest through the world’s largest wetlands to dry forests in Bolivia, breaking a previous record for the number of blazes seen in a year up to Sept 11.

Satellite data analysed by Brazil’s space research agency Inpe has registered 346,112 fire hot spots so far in 2024 in all 13 countries of South America, topping the earlier 2007 record of 345,322 hot spots in a data series that goes back to 1998.

A Reuters photographer travelling in the heart of Brazil’s Amazon this week witnessed massive fires burning in vegetation along roadways, blackening the landscape and leaving trees like burned matchsticks.

Smoke billowing from the Brazilian fires has darkened the skies above cities such as Sao Paulo, feeding into a corridor of wildfire smoke seen from space stretching diagonally across the continent from Colombia in the north-west to Uruguay in the south-east.

Brazil and Bolivia have dispatched thousands of firefighters to attempt to control the blazes, but remain mostly at the mercy of extreme weather fuelling the fires.

Scientists say that while most fires are set by humans, the recent hot and dry conditions being driven by climate change are helping the fires spread more quickly. South America has been hit by a series of heatwaves since 2023.

“We never had winter,” said Ms Karla Longo, an air quality researcher at Inpe, of the weather in Sao Paulo in recent months. “It’s absurd.”

Despite still being winter in the Southern Hemisphere, high temperatures in Sao Paulo have held at more than 32 deg C since Sept 7.

Hundreds of people marched in Bolivia’s highland, political capital La Paz to demand action against the fires, holding banners and placards saying: “For cleaner air stop burning” and “Bolivia in flames”.

“Please realise what is really happening in the country, we have lost millions of hectares,” said Ms Fernanda Negron, an animal rights activist in the protest. “Millions of animals have been burned to death.”

In Brazil, a drought that began in 2023 has become the worst on record, according to national disaster monitoring agency Cemaden.

“In general, the 2023 to 2024 drought is the most intense, long-lasting in some regions and extensive in recent history, at least in the data since 1950,” said Dr Ana Paula Cunha, a drought researcher with Cemaden.

The greatest number of fires in September is in Brazil and Bolivia, followed by Peru, Argentina and Paraguay, according to Inpe data.

Unusually intense fires that hit Venezuela, Guyana and Colombia earlier in 2024 contributed to the record but have largely subsided.

Ms Longo said fire from deforestation in the Amazon create particularly intense smoke because of the density of the vegetation burning.

“The sensation you get flying next to one of these plumes is like that of an atomic mushroom cloud,” she said.

Roughly nine million sq km of South America have been covered in smoke at times, more than half of the continent, she said.

Sao Paulo, the most populous city in the Western Hemisphere, earlier this week had the worst air quality globally, higher than famous pollution hot spots such as China and India, according to website IQAir.com.

Bolivia’s capital of La Paz was similarly blanketed in smoke.

Ms Longo said exposure to the smoke will drive up the number of people seeking hospital treatment for respiratory issues and may cause thousands of premature deaths.

Inhaling wildfire smoke contributes to an average of 12,000 early deaths a year in South America, according to a 2023 study in the academic journal Environmental Research: Health.

September is typically the peak month for fires in South America. It is unclear if the continent will continue to have high numbers of fires in 2024.

While rain is forecast next week for Brazil’s centre south, where Sao Paulo is located, drought conditions are expected to continue to October in Brazil’s northern Amazon region and centre-west agricultural region. REUTERS