Global concerns surge over Amazon wildfires

Environmentalists fear fires may damage ecology as forests span 5.5m square km

Nations along the Amazon River are not only battling huge blazes in the forests but also fighting the perception that development policies are responsible for the fires that environmentalists fear may damage the rainforest and continental ecology.

The eight-month-old government of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has accepted some troops and firefighting assistance from some nations, although he is equivocating on whether to accept financial aid from the G7 bloc of countries.

"More than 43,000 members of the armed forces (navy, army and air force) are located in the region. They are available to act on demand, coordinate with environmental control and public safety agencies," said the Brazilian Ministry of Defense in a statement.

The Amazon rainforest spans more than 5.5 million square kilometers across nine countries. Two-thirds of this area is in Brazil. More than 160,000 forest fires have been recorded throughout the region so far this year, with about half of them in Brazil. Of the rest, 26,000 have been in Venezuela, 19,000 in Bolivia and around 14,000 each in Colombia and Argentina.

Israel and the United States have sent firefighting planes to help tackle the blaze. Other countries are leasing planes to spray water and fire retardants.

For the rest of the continent, the concern is that burning a particular section of the Amazon rainforest could adversely affect regional access to water and weather patterns. A single large tree in the Amazon can release about 1,000 liters of water into the atmosphere every day through a process called evapotranspiration. That water turns into rain that falls throughout the region.

"Calculating that, the Amazon would reach the extraordinary number of 20 billion tons of water in a single day. We call this rios voadores, or 'flying rivers'," said Ana Luiza Tunes, an environmental engineer who founded the Brazilian environmental website Tunes Ambiental.

"It is the 'flying rivers' formed in the Amazon that bring water back to the continent. This leads us to conclude that the Amazon rainforest is not only the main the lungs of the world but the heart of planet Earth."

But during the dry season, which typically runs from May until October, fires in the Amazon spark from natural sources like lightning strikes.

No particular

Some argue that this year's fire season is not particularly different from others.

According to NASA, total fire activity across the Amazon basin as of Aug 16 was close to average over the past 15 years. Global Forest Watch, an online platform that provides data and tools to monitor forests, agreed, though data from other agencies point to increases in the number of fires.

"There were 17,351 MODIS fire alerts reported in the week of Aug 19, 2019. This was average compared to the same week in previous years," a report on the platform said. MODIS stands for "Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer", a technique used by NASA.

Renan Buchelt de Oliveira, a Brazilian environmental consultant and forensics expert, said: "The problem is the media war against the current government, not a fire increase."

He said that opposition parties have harshly criticized Bolsonaro's young government and management of the fires.

But critics say the president's development policies are responsible for a significant portion of the increase in fire cases, due to the expansion of slash-and-burn tactics. They argue that this year's spike in the number of fires is the beginning of a trend caused by runaway deforestation.

Around 2,500 fires are currently burning in Brazil. Fires have spread across the tropical forests and savannas near Bolivia's border with Paraguay and Brazil.

"More than 800,000 hectares of the Chiquitano Forest (inside the Amazon forest) were burned in Bolivia during August. This region is the largest dry rainforest in the world and at risk of losing this title," Tunes said.

Burning of forest land in the Bolivian Amazon to expand crop production also came under scrutiny.

On Aug 25, Bolivian President Evo Morales' government said the country was open to international aid after being slow to accept other countries help to fight the fires.