RIO DE JANEIRO (AFP) – Wildfires in Brazil last year consumed a total area larger than all of Italy, a monitor reported yesterday, as the country continues to battle blazes often set by farmers and ranchers illegally expanding their territory.
Some 30.8 million hectares of vegetation were burned in Brazil in 2024, a 79 per cent increase from 2023, monitoring platform MapBiomas reported.
Fires in the Amazon, a crucial carbon sink for the rest of the world as well as a global hotspot of biodiversity, accounted for 58 per cent of the damage. The figures are discouraging news for the government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who in November will host the UN COP30 climate conference in the Amazonian city of Belem.
The 2024 figures represent the largest area burned since 2019. Some 8.5 million hectares of forest burned in 2024, compared to 2.2 million in 2023, and in the Amazon, fires took out more forest than grassland for the first time, according to the data.
“This is a terrible indicator, because, once forests are burned, they become more susceptible to future fires,” said Ane Alencar, of MapBiomas. Climate change makes vegetation drier and thus more prone to burning. But in Brazil, the main driver of the fires are ranchers and farmers who clear land for pasture and agriculture – a crime the government struggles to contain. Lula has made preserving the Amazon a priority of his government, following lax protections against human expansion into the territory under his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro.
But in September, Lula admitted that the country was not “100 per cent prepared” to face a wave of forest fires that his government attributed to “climate terrorism.”
The Brazilian Amazon saw its highest number of fires in 17 years in 2024, government data published earlier this month showed, after the vast biome suffered months of a lengthy drought.
