RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – According to data from the Queimadas Program of the National Institute of Space Research (INPE), the agency that monitors fires, the fires this past August in the Amazon were almost three times the number recorded last year.
There were 30,901 fires until this Saturday, 31st, compared to 10,421 in August of last year – an increase of 196 percent.
The total number of outbreaks also exceeds the historical monthly average for August — 25,853 — measured between 1998 and 2018. It is the highest since August 2010 – a year of severe historical drought with 45,018 outbreaks.
The fires are scattered throughout the so called “arc of deforestation”, which goes from Acre, passing through Rondônia, southern Amazonas, northern Mato Grosso and southeastern Pará.
The main theory of experts is that the fires are taking place to clean up the areas where trees had been previously felled.
Last Friday, August 30th, President Jair Bolsonaro amended the ordinance that banned burning throughout the country during the drought period, carving out an exception for “agricultural practices, outside the Legal Amazon, when essential to the carrying out of the harvest operation, if previously authorized by the state environmental agency.”
The measure altered the decree published by the president the day before, on Thursday, August 29th, which had prohibited for 60 days the setting of fires anywhere in the country.
During an Internet broadcast last Thursday, the president also called “charity” the aid offered by the G-7 countries to combat the environmental crisis in the Legal Amazon.
“We had a meeting on Tuesday, August 27th, with governors of the Amazon region. And there, only one spoke of money, about the charity offered by Macron (president of France). Brazil is worth much more than US$20 million,” he said. At the same time, the president once again defended the proposition that the fires in the Amazon are not abnormal.
On August 21st, the coordination of the Climate Observatory, a group that brings together some 50 NGOs in favor of actions against climate change, said the record number of
fires observed this year is only “the most visible symptom of the Jair Bolsonaro government’s environmental anti-politics.”