In the 48 hours following the government ban of deliberately setting the Amazon on fire, there were some 3,859 new outbreaks recorded by the country’s National Space Research Institute (INPE). The ban has done nothing to secure the safety of the ‘lungs of the world’ since 2,000 of those outbreaks were in the Amazon rainforest.
The bad news just continues to pour in while the world is in a state of shock and panic about this massive environmental crisis at hand. The Amazon fires were even at the top of the agenda at the recent G7 summit in France. The situation is so severe that over 72,000 fires have already been detected across Brazil between January and August – the highest number since records began in 2013 and an 83% increase on the same period last year.
Climate change experts consider the Amazon as key to the future of the planet. It is the largest tropical rainforest in the world. It is also a crucial carbon store that slows down global warming. Its destruction reduces the ability of nature to suck carbon from the atmosphere. The smaller the Amazon gets, the more carbon dioxide there will be in the atmosphere and the hotter the planet will get.
But Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has systematically weakened institutions designed to protect the rainforest, while offering moral support to farmers wishing to turn the land into cattle ranches, because to him the country’s economy trumps all.
Even if all fires did stop as they were supposed to, Tasso Azevedo, who runs the deforestation monitoring group Mapbiomas, said that developers clearing the forest would continue to legally chop down trees – and then simply burn them after the prohibition period ended. He has called for the ban to be extended all the way till November when the dry season ends.
Azevedo said:
What we are experiencing is a real crisis, which can turn into a tragedy that will feature fires much larger than the current ones if not stopped immediately.
