With the extreme drought that affected Brazil in 2024, fires increased by 79% compared to 2023. Last year, fires consumed more than 30.8 million hectares, an area equivalent to the size of Italy, according to data released by MapBiomas' Fire Monitor platform (the first version of the monthly mapping of fire scars for the country).
The fires mainly devastated forest formations, which for the first time since 2019, when the Fire Monitor began operating, outnumbered pasture areas, as Felipe Martenexen from the MapBiomas Fire team explains.
“This change in the pattern of fires is alarming because forest areas affected by fire become more susceptible to new fires. It is worth noting that fires in the Amazon rainforest are not a natural phenomenon and not part of its ecological dynamics, but are an element introduced by human actions,” Martenexen says.
Of the total area burned, 73% was native vegetation, mainly in forest formations, which accounted for 25% of the fires in the country. Among agricultural areas, pastures stood out, with 6.7 million hectares burned between January and December last year. In terms of biomes, the Amazon rainforest was the most affected. Among the states, Pará leads the ranking of fires.
“This record in the Amazon was driven by a rainfall regime below the historical average, aggravating environmental conditions,” explains Martenexen.
Previously released data from MapBiomas researchers highlights fires on undesignated public lands, regions under the responsibility of state or federal governments that have not yet been transformed into settlements or other protected territories, such as Indigenous Lands and Quilombola Territories.
In these places, where fire is used for land grabbing, fires increased by 64% in 2024 compared to the previous year. “It seems that in 2024 the easiest way to impact a public forest wasn't to bring in tractors and chainsaws and hire labor to cut it down; it was just to strike a match because the forest was so flammable that the fire did the job,” explains Ane Alencar, the Amazon Environmental Research Institute's science director and coordinator of MapBiomas Fire.
It could be worse
Since 2023, Brazil has seen a drop in deforestation in the Amazon and Cerrado [Brazilian Savannah]. However, data from the Fire Monitor highlights the need for policies to prevent and control fires and to monitor environmental crimes.
“I think this increase could have been greater if the government, especially the federal government, hadn't acted to halve deforestation in the last two years,” says Alencar. “But it certainly served as a warning that reducing deforestation alone is not enough to combat environmental degradation,” he states.
According to a statement sent to Brasil de Fato by the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, “the year 2025 will begin with the National Policy for Integrated Fire Management, already in operation, which will guarantee the strengthening of coordination with states and municipalities, a crucial factor in achieving faster responses to fires.”
The ministry also reports that in 2024 “the Amazon Fund approved the allocation of around US$ 52 million to the Fire Departments of seven of the nine states of the Legal Amazon: Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Maranhão, Pará, Rondônia, and Roraima. The funds will finance the expansion of fire prevention and firefighting efforts in these states to strengthen their firefighting capacity by 2025. The provision of funds for Mato Grosso and Tocantins states is under analysis.”
In agriculture, pastures were the most affected
In the state of São Paulo, which had a record number of fires in 2024, the five most burned municipalities account for an area of more than 179,000 hectares of sugarcane cultivation, as reported by Brasil de Fato.
In the national ranking of territories occupied by agricultural activities, pastureland stands out, with 6.7 million hectares (nearly the entire area of Ireland) burned between January and December last year.
São Félix do Xingu, in Pará state, home to the country's largest cattle herd, was the Brazilian municipality most affected by fire, with 1.47 million hectares burned from January to December. Corumbá, in Mato Grosso do Sul state, with the second-largest cattle herd in the country, came second among the municipalities with the largest area burned in 2024. There, the fire consumed 841,000 hectares.
Edited by: Dayze Rocha
