Fires from the Arctic to the Amazon. According to the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), an atmospheric observation programme of the European Union, in the first half of 2019, 3500 megatonnes (i.e. millions of tonnes) of carbon dioxide were released from fires around the world, which is on average for the last 16 years.
A fire near Delta Junction, Alaska, last June
Unprecedented Arctic fires Last year fires ravaged large areas of Siberia and Alaska, beyond the Arctic Circle. Greenland has also been affected to a lesser extent. According to the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), at least 100 fires of significant duration and intensity have occurred north of the Arctic Circle since June 2021. Forests in these areas have always been affected by fires, but this time the phenomenon is “unprecedented”. This is how both CAMS (which depends on the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) described it. Last year’s fires, in addition to starting a month earlier than usual, are extraordinary both in terms of their duration and their territorial extent. According to the WMO, these fires in June alone produced as much CO2 as Sweden emits in a year. And this is only a partial estimate, which some scientists believe has already been exceeded.
Poorer countries more exposed
Just in these days an Oxfam report has underlined how the poorest countries of the planet are also the most vulnerable and defenseless in front of the enormous consequences of climate change.
Approximately 10 million hectares are lost each year due to the conversion of forests to agricultural land.
In tropical forests, fires and deforestation go hand in hand. Intensive livestock farming, which needs more and more land to satisfy the growing demand, monocultures of commodities for international export, such as soy, are the set of causes, intertwined and complex, at the base of the fires that have destroyed and are destroying hectares and hectares of Amazon forest.
From rainforest to savannah, the step is short for the Amazon devastated by fires and uncontrolled logging and increasingly exposed to global warming.
A recent study by the Stockholm Resilience Centre raises the alarm, according to which today up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest is already at a tipping point, closer to forests with grasslands typical of the savannah.
In the first ten months of 2020, the Amazon rainforest suffered from fires far more than in the entire previous year, and so did the Pantanal, Brazil’s other green lung. Compared to September 2019, fires in the Amazon increased by more than 60 percent, giving the rainforest its worst record in 10 years, in a context further exacerbated by the persistent drought.
The alarming figure was derived from satellite imagery from the space agency INPE (National Institute for Space Research), which detected more than 32 thousand ignited fires in September 2020, 61% more than in September 2019 and an average increase in fires of 13% in the first 9 months of 2020. More than twice as many fires were recorded in October 2020 compared to the same month last year: the Brazilian Amazon was affected by 17,326 fires compared to 7,855 in October 2019.
Pantanal, the largest wetland on Earth, experienced its worst year in INPE’s historical series since 1998. Here, there were 21,215 outbreaks in 2020 to date (and the year is not yet over) compared to 4,413 for the whole of 2019. According to Lasa, (Environmental Satellite Applications Laboratory) fires have destroyed 28% of the Pantanal, totaling 4.2 million hectares of forest. The fires are clearly related to the advance of industrial agriculture in the forest, often to make room for livestock pastures and crops.