Pantanal’s intense blazes stoke fears of another destructive fire season

The sky around the Brazilian city of Corumbá turned a blistering orange in late June as wildfires raged in the surrounding Pantanal. Intense fires have been burning early in this part of the world’s largest tropical wetlands this year, engulfing communities in smoke and leaving a trail of charred animal carcasses. Earlier in June, a riverside school in Mato Grosso do Sul state, where Corumbá is located, had to be evacuated due to approaching flames.

Waters didn’t flood the Pantanal as usual this rainy season, giving little respite to the wetlands that straddle Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia, following a prolonged fire season in 2023. The ongoing drought — one of the worst ever, according to several experts — combined with high temperatures and low rainfall have made the Pantanal particularly vulnerable to fires this year, stoking concerns that the biome might see a repeat of the devastating 2020 fire season. That year, 26% of the Brazilian Pantanal burned, and an estimated 17 million vertebrate animals were killed.

“We had signs that this year would be very difficult because of the drought, that there was a high chance of seeing fires again like in 2020, but we expected this to happen around August because that’s [usually] the driest period,” said Grasiela Porfirio, a biologist with the NGO Instituto Homem Pantaneiro (IHP) based in Corumbá.

“Except that this year, the Paraguay River didn’t fill up, so we didn’t have a flood pulse in the Pantanal and we’re going through this now. Fires have taken on huge proportions since late May,” Porfirio told Mongabay by phone.

Data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) show that fire alerts have increased by more than 2,100% compared with last year. In the first 23 days of June alone, INPE recorded 2,363 fire hotspots, by far a record for the month before it’s even over (records go back to 1998).

Although the overall number of fires so far this year is similar to that four years ago, the blazes have destroyed an area more than twice as large as of 23 June: 627,000 hectares (1.5 million acres), compared to 258,225 hectares (638,088 acres) in 2020, according to the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro’s LASA satellite system.

A new reality

Home to an extraordinary diversity of wildlife, the Pantanal is a complex mosaic of savannas, grasslands and forests that has always coexisted with fire — some natural, most human-made, traditionally used by local communities for subsistence farming or ranching. But experts say a changing climate and increased human activity have started altering the biome, making it more vulnerable to potentially uncontrollable blazes.

The Pantanal’s low-lying floodplains usually swell with water during the rainy months, starting in October-November, and then dry out when the waters start to recede in May-June, a movement described as the flood pulse. But successive years of low flooding levels — the last big flood was in 2018 — have left usually submerged vegetation parched.

In May, Brazil’s National Water Agency declared a situation of “critical hydric scarcity” in the Paraguay River Basin. The rivers that irrigate the Pantanal all originate in the upper basin, which is under stress from hydroelectric dams and the clearing of forests and savannas for pastures and crops.

“We used to have a Pantanal that would burn around the edges, in areas that were truly drier, because it was a more humid environment,” said Eduardo Rosa, coordinator of Pantanal mapping for MapBiomas, a mapping platform tracking deforestation, fires and land-use change. “But in recent years, since 2018, we have a Pantanal that is catching fire around the Paraguay River” in areas not adapted to flames, he added.

The grassland areas around the Paraguay River, sites of the worst of this June’s fires, are rich in biomass, highly flammable organic matter that would normally be waterlogged at this time of year. “It’s much harder to control the fire in a region with lots of biomass,” Geraldo Damasceno, a biologist and fire expert at the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul, told Mongabay by phone.

People on the ground say this year’s blazes are in areas that are particularly difficult to access, posing a further challenge.

The clearing of vegetation for large-scale agriculture is also a growing problem in the wetlands. The Pantanal lost more than 49,600 hectares (122,600 acres) of native vegetation last year, according to MapBiomas, a 59% increase in deforestation from the previous year. “Because of the drought, people are clearing areas, deforesting, in the center of the Pantanal,” Rosa said.

Unlike for other biomes in Brazil, there’s no federal legislation specifically protecting the Pantanal. Earlier this month, the Supreme Federal Court found that Congress was failing to meet its constitutional duty by not having passed such a law, and gave it 18 months to draft and approve such legislation.

At the state level, both Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul have approved such legislation in the last two years. Mato Grosso do Sul’s Pantanal Law, which came into force in February, bans new plantations of exotic species like sugarcane, soy and eucalyptus, and establishes limits for the clearing of forest and Cerrado vegetation on rural properties.

The situation is also a reflection of the new extremes driven by human-made climate change. Liana Anderson, a researcher at the government’s National Center for Monitoring and Warning of Natural Disasters (Cemaden), noted that the dynamics at play in the Pantanal are the same ones that recently caused devastating floods in the south of the country, a historic drought in the northern Amazon last year, or both in quick succession in the northwestern state of Acre.

“We’re going through a climate crisis,” she said, noting that Cemaden’s warnings no longer apply to just a handful of municipalities, but to entire regions. “My feeling is that all future events, including these fires we’re going through now, are always going to be on a big scale.”

Government response

There’s a broad consensus that, having learnt from the catastrophic experience four years ago and poured resources into firefighting and preparation efforts, state authorities are much better equipped to fight the flames this time around. This year Mato Grosso do Sul has set up 13 new bases that should help speed up the deployment of firefighters to blazes in remote areas.

The biome’s 66 community and private brigades are also better prepared and integrated with government forces, said Leonardo Gomes, the director of SOS Pantanal, an NGO with one such brigade.

The federal government has also been working with state authorities to coordinate firefighting strategies. Earlier this month it set up a situation room to help increase funding and simplify the contracting of personnel and equipment for fire responses across all biomes. It didn’t specify what budget would be allocated to these efforts, however. In May, the union of environmental workers, Ascema, warned that a 24% cut to the firefighting budget of IBAMA, the federal environmental protection agency, was hindering its capacity to effectively combat blazes across the country.

Many say they worry the government response is insufficient, especially as it’s so early in the season. On June 13, a group of 30 local civil society organizations urged the governors of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul, as well as IBAMA, to request international aid via the European Union’s Emergency Response Coordination Centre.

“It is the government’s responsibility to not just increase to the maximum its capacity to confront the fire season and its developments, but also to recognize its operational limitations,” they wrote in the letter seen by Mongabay.

“We need to make the most of all the [help] we can get,” said Gomes, whose organization is one of the signatories. He said he believes it’s the response from different actors now that will determine whether the Pantanal sees another disaster on the scale of the 2020 catastrophe.

But with no sign of respite in the coming months from the hot, dry weather, the outlook is worrying.

“Last year was the worst November for fires in the historical series. Now we have the worst June in history,” Gomes said. “So we ask ourselves how things will pan out from June to September, when things tend to get worse; and how we can prepare for the future.”

Banner image: Fires are tearing through the Pantanal, their spread quickened by accumulated biomass. Image courtesy of Gustavo Figueirôa/SOS Pantanal.

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