2020 Brazil rainforest wildfires | |
---|---|
Location | Amazonas and Pantanal |
Statistics | |
Date(s) | January 2020 - August 2020 |
The 2020 Brazil rainforest wildfires were a series of forest fires that were affecting Brazil, with 44,013 outbreaks of fires registered between January and August in the Amazonas and Pantanal. [2] [3] Within the Amazon, 6,315 outbreaks of fire were detected in the same period. [4] Within the Pantanal, the volume of fires is equivalent to those of the past six years [5] and there have been actions by NGOs and volunteers to save endangered animals, such as the jaguar. [6] It was expected that the health systems of the Amazon region, already overloaded by the COVID-19 pandemic, would be even more overloaded due to respiratory diseases due to smoke emitted by the wildfires. [7] [8]
Expertise carried out points out that the fires in the Pantanal were started by human action [9] and the Environmental Police Station investigates who are possibly responsible. [10]
Douglas Morton, head of NASA's Biospheric Sciences Laboratory, considers fires to be "unprecedented". [11] Although the Brazilian government has instituted a 120-day ban on burning in the Amazon, an analysis led by NASA indicates that this was of little effect. [12] [13]
Between May 28 and August 25, 516 fire points were detected covering an area of 376,416 hectares. [14]
In August, President Jair Bolsonaro's response was that "the media and foreign governments are presenting a false narrative about the Amazon". [15] The same month Brazil's National Institute for Space Research reported that satellite data shows that the number of fires in the Amazon increased by 28% to ~6,800 fires in July compared to the ~5,300 wildfires in July 2019. This indicated a, potentially worsened, repeat of 2019's accelerated destruction of one of the world's largest protectable buffers against global warming in 2020. [16] [17] [18] Satellites in September recorded 32,017 hotspots in the world's largest rainforest, a 61% rise from the same month in 2019.
In September INPE reported that 1,359 km2 of the Brazilian Amazon have burned off in August, which may put the effectiveness of the contemporary response against the deforestation – such as considerations of economic interventions and the current military operation – into question. [19] The 6,087 km2 of lost rainforest in 2020 as of early September – ~95% of the period in 2019 [19] – is about the size of Palestine.
In the Pantanal, part of the fire started in private areas or legal reserves (which is protected by law) and spread to indigenous territories. [20] On 13 September preliminary data based on satellite images, indicate that 1.5 million hectares have burned in the Pantanal region since the start of August, surpassing the previous fire season record from 2005. [21] On September 15 it was reported that 23,500 km2 – ~12% of the Pantanal – have burned off in 2020, [22] killing millions of vertebrates. [23]
The Amazon rainforest, also called Amazon jungle or Amazonia, is a moist broadleaf tropical rainforest in the Amazon biome that covers most of the Amazon basin of South America. This basin encompasses 7,000,000 km2 (2,700,000 sq mi), of which 5,500,000 km2 (2,100,000 sq mi) are covered by the rainforest. This region includes territory belonging to nine nations and 3,344 formally acknowledged indigenous territories.
Amazonas ( ) is a state of Brazil, located in the North Region in the north-western corner of the country. It is the largest Brazilian state by area and the ninth-largest country subdivision in the world. It is the largest country subdivision in South America, being greater than the areas of Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay combined. Mostly located in the Southern Hemisphere, Amazonas is the third-largest country subdivision in the Southern Hemisphere after the Australian states of Western Australia and Queensland. Located entirely in the Western Hemisphere, it is the fourth-largest country subdivision in the Western Hemisphere after Greenland, Nunavut, and Alaska. If independent, Amazonas could become the sixteenth-largest country in the world, slightly larger than Mongolia. Neighbouring states are Roraima, Pará, Mato Grosso, Rondônia, and Acre. It also borders the nations of Peru, Colombia and Venezuela. This includes the Departments of Amazonas, Vaupés and Guainía in Colombia, as well as the Amazonas state in Venezuela, and the Loreto Region in Peru.
Mato Grosso is one of the states of Brazil, the third largest by area, located in the Central-West region. The state has 1.66% of the Brazilian population and is responsible for 1.9% of the Brazilian GDP.
The Jaú National Park is a national park located in the state of Amazonas, Brazil. It is one of the largest forest reserve in South America, and part of a World Heritage Site.
Manaus is the capital and largest city of the Brazilian state of Amazonas. It is the seventh-largest city in Brazil, with an estimated 2020 population of 2,219,580 distributed over a land area of about 11,401 km2 (4,402 sq mi). Located at the east centre of the state, the city is the centre of the Manaus metropolitan area and the largest metropolitan area in the North Region of Brazil by urban landmass. It is situated near the confluence of the Negro and Amazon rivers. It is one of the two cities in the Amazon Rainforest with a population of over 1 million people, alongside Belém.
The Pantanal is a natural region encompassing the world's largest tropical wetland area, and the world's largest flooded grasslands. It is located mostly within the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul, but it extends into Mato Grosso and portions of Bolivia and Paraguay. It sprawls over an area estimated at between 140,000 and 195,000 km2. Various subregional ecosystems exist, each with distinct hydrological, geological and ecological characteristics; up to 12 of them have been defined.
Amazônia Legal, also known as Brazil's Legal Amazon (BLA), is the largest socio-geographic division in Brazil, containing all nine states in the Amazon basin. The government designated this region in 1948 based on its studies on how to plan the economic and social development of the Amazon region.
The Trans-Amazonian Highway, was introduced on September 27, 1972. It is 4,000 km long, making it the third longest highway in Brazil. It runs through the Amazon forest and the Brazilian states of Paraíba, Ceará, Piauí, Maranhão, Tocantins, Pará and Amazonas, from the proximities of Saboeiro up until the town of Lábrea.
Brazil once had the highest deforestation rate in the world and in 2005 still had the largest area of forest removed annually. Since 1970, over 700,000 square kilometres (270,000 sq mi) of the Amazon rainforest have been destroyed. In 2001, the Amazon was approximately 5,400,000 square kilometres (2,100,000 sq mi), which is only 87% of the Amazon's original size. According to official data, about 729,000 km² have already been deforested in the Amazon biome, which corresponds to 17% of the total. 300,000 km² have been deforested in the last 20 years.
Environmental issues in Brazil include deforestation, illegal wildlife trade, illegal poaching, air, land degradation, and water pollution caused by mining activities, wetland degradation, pesticide use and severe oil spills, among others. As the home to approximately 13% of all known species, Brazil has one of the most diverse collections of flora and fauna on the planet. Impacts from agriculture and industrialization in the country threaten this biodiversity.
The Amazon rainforest, spanning an area of 3,000,000 km2, is the world's largest rainforest. It encompasses the largest and most biodiverse tropical rainforest on the planet, representing over half of all rainforests. The Amazon region includes the territories of nine nations, with Brazil containing the majority (60%), followed by Peru (13%), Colombia (10%), and smaller portions in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana.
The Amazon biome contains the Amazon rainforest, an area of tropical rainforest, and other ecoregions that cover most of the Amazon basin and some adjacent areas to the north and east. The biome contains blackwater and whitewater flooded forest, lowland and montane terra firma forest, bamboo and palm forest, savanna, sandy heath and alpine tundra. Some areas of the biome are threatened by deforestation for timber and to make way for pasture or soybean plantations.
The Rio Roosevelt Ecological Station is an ecological station in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil.
The Serra de Santa Bárbara State Park is a state park in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil. It preserves a unique environment where the Amazon rainforest, pantanal and cerrado meet, and holds many endemic or endangered species.
Ricardo Magnus Osório Galvão is a prominent Brazilian physicist and engineer, formerly the Director-General of the National Institute for Space Research. He is a full Professor of the Institute of Physics of the University of São Paulo, member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, fellow of the Institute of Physics and councilman of the European Physical Society. Galvão has occupied major positions within the Brazilian Physics community such as the presidency of the Brazilian Physical Society (2013–2016) and the directorship of the Brazilian Center for Research in Physics (2004–2011).
The presidency of Jair Bolsonaro started on January 1, 2019, when he was inaugurated as the 38th president of Brazil, and ended on December 31, 2022, with the inauguration of the cabinet of Lula da Silva III on January 1, 2023. He was elected the president of Brazil on October 28, 2018, by obtaining 55.1% of the valid votes in the 2018 Brazilian general election, defeating Fernando Haddad. On October 30, 2022, Bolsonaro was defeated by Lula da Silva. In the years Brazil has been a democracy since 1985, Bolsonaro became the first president to lose an election as an incumbent.
Events in the year 2020 in Brazil.
The 2019 Amazon rainforest wildfires season saw a year-to-year surge in fires occurring in the Amazon rainforest and Amazon biome within Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Peru during that year's Amazonian tropical dry season. Fires normally occur around the dry season as slash-and-burn methods are used to clear the forest to make way for agriculture, livestock, logging, and mining, leading to deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. Such activity is generally illegal within these nations, but enforcement of environmental protection can be lax. The increased rates of fire counts in 2019 led to international concern about the fate of the Amazon rainforest, which is the world's largest terrestrial carbon dioxide sink and plays a significant role in mitigating global warming.
The COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil affected the state of Amazonas. The first case was from a 39-year-old woman who had returned from England.
On 5 June 2022, Brazilian indigenist Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips were murdered during a boat trip through the Vale do Javari, the second-largest indigenous area in Brazil.