RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil: According to satellite images released by the Brazilian Institute of Space Research (INPE) Thursday, 17,182 forest fires broke out in Brazil between January and April this year, more than half of them in the Amazon region.
This is an 81 percent increase over the same period last year and the highest number of forest fires recorded in Brazil during this period since data collection began in 1998.
The previous record was set in 2003 with 16,888 outbreaks in the first four months of that year.
Brazil’s environment ministry said the country’s agribusiness sector routinely burns forests to make way for farmland, and attributed the increase to the effects of climate change, such as drought.
In the Brazilian Amazon, home to more than 60 percent of the world’s largest rainforest, INPE recorded 8,977 forest fires from January to April, the highest number since 2016.
This figure has increased by 153% compared to the same period last year.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s government cut Amazon deforestation by 50 percent during its first year in office in 2023, after it soared under his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro.
However, the forest fire situation remains alarming.
The country’s Environment Ministry in a statement said that forest fires in Brazil and other countries in the region, such as Colombia and Chile have been intensified by climate change and by one of the strongest El Nino phenomena in history, which caused a long drought in many areas of the Amazon last year.
