While the world’s attention has focused on the smoky disaster in Indonesia and neighboring Southeast Asian countries, suffering one of the worst burning seasons in memory, a fire of equal proportion has been smoldering in Brazil’s sparsely populated Amazon rain forest.
Manaus, in the heart of Brazil’s Amazon, has never before had such a problem with the seasonal jungle and grass fires that annually ignite the Amazon’s fringes.
Smoke has been so thick in Manaus this month that boat captains have been unable to navigate the Amazon River. The city’s international airport has repeatedly closed, even for instrument landings.
Hospitals report a 40 percent increase in respiratory disease, particularly among children. Last week, with fire closing in on the city and a thermal inversion trapping smoke at ground level, authorities launched an unprecedented helicopter and ground battle against the blazes.
“This is shaping up as the worst year ever” for Amazon burning, said Stephan Schwartzman, a senior scientist with the Washington-based Environmental Defense Fund.
A smoke cloud hovers over more than 800,000 square miles of the Amazon, an area equivalent in size to Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore combined. Scattered fires rage over an area half the size of the continental United States.
U.S. satellite data show that the number of fires burning in the Amazon has jumped 28 percent from last year, the previous record year.
Even more disturbing, scientists believe that for every acre visibly on fire, another acre is burning beneath the closed forest canopy, destroying the forest floor and turning the rain forest canopy into tinder.
“It appears satellite data are only telling half the story,” Schwartzman said. “What we’re seeing is setting the stage for bigger, more destructive fires.”
Fires are a seasonal phenomenon in the Amazon, set from July to November by ranchers trying to renovate grassland or clear forest for grazing. The majority of the fires attack only the fringes of the intact rain forest.
This year, however, rainfall has been particularly scarce and humidity levels that usually top 60 percent in the Amazon region have dropped to around 43 percent, the lowest level in almost 60 years.
The dry conditions, blamed largely on the El Nino phenomenon this year, have allowed the thousands of small ranch fires to race out of control.
Fires also are appearing across areas of the Amazon largely untouched up to now, raising fears of vast new deforestation. Normally only around 7 percent of seasonal fires attack virgin rain forest.
This year, fires have scorched unprecedented expanses in the Brazilian states of Para, Mato Grosso, Tocantins, Rondonia and Maranhao. Even Amazonas state, in the center of the world’s largest remaining rain forest, has lost nearly 4,000 acres, up from last year’s record of 2,500 acres, said Antonio de Oliveira, acting superintendent in Manaus for IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency.
“Every year things burn, but this year it’s out of control,” he said.
Under Brazilian law, ranchers are required to obtain permits before setting grass or forest fires and to avoid burning during periods of high wind and other potential threats.
In reality, with only a handful of officers to police an area half the size of the continental U.S., the agency has no control, De Oliveira said.
“There’s not a lot of incentive for anybody to follow the rules,” Schwartzman added.
Fire losses are piling up, even for the cattle ranchers who set many of the blazes. In recent years, as uncontrolled fires have swept across expanses of grazing land, destroying fences and denuding pasture, ranchers have reported losses of $10,000 or more annually, Schwartzman said.
Pinpointing the amount of rain forest lost to fires each year is difficult, in part because Brazil is years behind in analyzing its own satellite images of the region. Brazil’s space agency estimates annual Amazon deforestation at 5,750 square miles in its latest survey, but the estimate is based on 1994 data, before the huge burning seasons in recent years.
An updated estimate based on 1995-96 images is due to be released Nov. 30, IBAMA officials said.
Rain forest losses in the Amazon have fallen by half since the 1980s, when vast areas of the western Amazon in states like Rondonia burned after the opening of new highways in the region.
But Brazil continues to have the highest rate of deforestation in the world, according to a new study by the World Wildlife Fund.
Brazil disputes the study’s conclusion, saying that while it may cut or burn more rain forest than any other country, its total losses per year amount to just 0.4 percent of the Amazon region.
Scientists fear that percentage could grow. Fires and timber-cutting, not just on the fringes but deep inside the rain forest where valuable hardwoods like mahogany grow, are changing weather patterns and exposing ever greater areas of the Amazon forest to drying winds as well as colonization.
“As much as half of the closed forest of the Amazon may be near the limit of its capacity to remain moist through the dry season,” Schwartzman said.
If that limit is reached, “by this time next year we could see fires that make what’s going on now look like kindergartners playing with matches,” he said.
