(Rio de Janeiro) The number of fires in the Amazon in Brazil reached its highest level in almost 15 years on Monday, according to official figures, a new sign of the destruction caused in the largest tropical forest in the world.
Posted at 7:32 p.m.
Satellite images detected 3,358 fires on Monday August 22, the highest number in one day since September 2007, an official from the National Institute for Space Studies (INPE) confirmed to AFP on Thursday.
This figure is three times higher than August 10, 2019, known as “fire day”, when Brazilian farmers launched a vast slash-and-burn operation in the northeast of the country, which had spread to Sao Paulo, some 2,500 kilometers away, prompting international condemnation.
According to Alberto Setzer, head of INPE’s fire monitoring program, there is no evidence that Monday’s fires are coordinated. Rather, they are part of a general pattern of increasing deforestation.
Experts attribute the fires in the Amazon to the action of farmers, ranchers and speculators, who illegally clear land by burning trees.
“Regions with the most fires are moving further and further north,” following a “growing arc of deforestation,” Setzer told AFP.
The fire season in the Amazon usually begins in August, with the onset of drought.
This year, as of July, the INPE detected 5,373 fires, 8% more than in the same month in 2021.
Since the beginning of the current month, 24,124 fires have been recorded, which should be the worst month of August since the beginning of the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, even if it is still far from August 2005 (63,764 hearths detected , a record since 1998).
Jair Bolsonaro is criticized for his support for the destruction of the Amazon, for the benefit of agriculture. Since he came to power in January 2019, average annual deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon has increased by 75% compared to the previous decade.
The far-right president tweeted on Thursday addressing those who criticize his policies: “If they wanted a beautiful forest to belong to them, they should have preserved those of their own country… The Amazon belongs, and will belong. always, to the Brazilians”.