Brazil suffers worst forest fires in 14 years, underscoring lack of preparedness by Lula and state governors | Climate

The forest fires ravaging Brazil and Portugal have synchronized news programs in two countries united by a common language and history. One is gigantic, covering an area 90 times larger than its colonizing power. A media comparison of the two countries’ firefighting measures has exposed Brazil’s inability to combat the country’s worst fire crisis since 2010.

The South American country’s environmental agency has sent some 4,000 brigadiers (a record number), 22 planes and 1,000 vehicles to extinguish the flames. In Portugal, meanwhile, there are 6,500 brigadiers, 42 planes and 1,900 vehicles. The response of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his government has been “timid, insufficient and late, far from the aggressiveness of the fires and environmental crimes,” according to Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, a network of 120 Brazilian nonprofits.

Three months after devastating floods deluged the state of Rio Grande do Sul, the climate crisis is rearing its ugly head in Brazil again. The country has been burning for two and a half months, fueled by fires sparked by a historic drought — Brazil’s worst in 70 years — and organized crime, which took advantage of the previous administration of President Jair Bolsonaro to establish itself in the Amazon and other fragile ecosystems.

A few days before spring begins in the Southern Hemisphere, smoke covers 60% of the country. According to data from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), some 190,000 forest fires have broken out, twice as many as in 2023. The fires have caused greenhouse gas emissions to increase by 60% over the past quarter and claimed an unknown number of lives. This wave of fires is quantitatively worse than those seen in Bolsonaro’s first year in office, helping to confirm his position as one of the planet’s biggest environmental villains.

Astrini says that in 2019, Bolsonaro’s government refused to take action against the fires (it even rejected an offer of help from the G7), but there were no extreme drought conditions like the ones Brazil is currently experiencing. “There is a government response now, but it comes late. The president is not prepared materially or mentally to address the climate crisis. They did not believe it would happen,” Astrini says. He says the first meeting between the president and ministers on the fires took place last Monday, when the ecological disaster had already reached massive proportions.

At that meeting, the scientist explained the seriousness of the situation. Later, Lula announced that he had allocated an emergency $95 million to fight the fires and drought. The president resigned himself to the reality of the situation.

“The concrete fact is that today in Brazil we were not 100% prepared to deal with these things (extreme weather events). Ninety percent of the cities are not prepared. Few states have (sufficient) preparation, civil defense, firefighters, almost no one,” says Astrini. With the additional funds, Brazil plans to rent planes, hire more firefighters and brigadiers, mobilize the army and police, and provide food to those affected.

Most of the people fighting the fires on the front lines are foremen from small local communities, including indigenous people. Training is key, said Rodrigo Agostinho, president of Brazil’s state-run Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources About Globo this week. “Many people think that hiring firefighters and brigadiers is easy. You can’t hire someone without experience, it’s incredibly dangerous. We have to check them and train them,” Agostinho explained.

In addition to asking for more resources, he warned that the number of specialists being sent is a record, but that transporting and feeding them is logistical. Another challenge is Brazil’s size, which is twice the size of the European Union.

Climate events are multiplying and becoming increasingly virulent in Brazil—a trend seen across the planet. In June, floods inundated the state of Rio Grande do Sur for weeks, killing about 200 people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless.

The fire outbreak is so serious that residents of Brasília, Porto Velho and hundreds of other Brazilian cities need only open their windows to know that the crisis is far from over. Respiratory problems have worsened, affecting even a Supreme Court judge who was hospitalized with pneumonia. Images from the European Copernicus satellite show flames approaching the western slope of South America and the Atlantic. The situation has also become serious in Bolivia, Venezuela and Peru.

President Lula and his environment and climate change minister, Marina Silva, suspect criminals are behind the devastating fires. Environmentalists believe the blazes were deliberately started because, as Astrini explains, in areas of the Amazon where vegetation is healthy, there is usually too much moisture for fires to break out. What’s more, more than a month has passed since the last thunderstorm in the Cerrado and Pantanal ecosystems. Forest fires can be started by people trying to create illegal clearings or fields, or by cooking fires that get out of control. To prevent the situation from getting worse, governors have banned all fires, even those related to traditional forest management.

The 2019 outbreak began with a day of fire organized by farmers linked to Bolsonaro. Five years later, no one has been punished for their participation. Now the government wants to introduce harsher penalties for arson, but Congress opposes such measures, although the environmental lobby in Brazil is becoming stronger and more influential. In any case, the accusations against arsonists that have actually been brought to court are a drop in the ocean compared to the scale of the current tragedy. At most, a hundred cases are filed each year, while the number of fires has risen to tens of thousands.

Currently, government action is limited by budget concerns, as firefighting efforts are largely the responsibility of states. Many governors are boycotting federal programs or are reluctant to take action against the fires because of complicity with organized crime organizations that are plundering the jungles, because they still align with Bolsonaro’s anti-environmental discourse, lack of resources, or a combination of factors. But even the federal government has yet to take a firm stance on coordinating efforts.

Environmental nonprofits are also warning of a significant, related change. This outbreak of fires has also burned living vegetation, not just areas that have been cleared and developed. Brazilian environmentalists know that small governments have been unable to prevent the drought, but there has been little effort to apprehend criminals, who have largely escaped punishment. Such experts say that firefighting should be rare and, ideally, prevented from occurring in the first place.

On Wednesday, Brazil expressed solidarity with Portugal in a statement from its Foreign Ministry. After mourning the loss of life and property caused by the fires, Lula’s government appealed to allied countries “to redouble their efforts to adapt to the effects of climate change, in order to confront the proliferation of extreme natural phenomena.”

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