▲ Since the beginning of the month, the Bolivian city of La Paz has been experiencing one of the worst air pollution crises in its history due to forest fires.Photo Xinhua
Reuters and AFP
The newspaper La Jornada
Saturday, September 14, 2024, p. 23
Sao Paulo, March 11 (EFE).- Fires are raging across South America, from the Brazilian Amazon rainforest to the dry forests of Bolivia and the world’s largest wetlands, breaking the record for fires recorded in a year as of September 11.
Satellite data analyzed by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) have recorded 346,112 fire outbreaks so far this year in South America, surpassing the 2007 record of 345,322 outbreaks, in a data series dating back to 1998.
Smoke from the Brazilian fires has darkened the skies over cities like Sao Paulo, fueling a smoke corridor that stretches diagonally across the continent from Colombia to Uruguay.
Brazil and Bolivia have sent thousands of firefighters to try to control the flames, but most remain at the mercy of the extreme weather conditions that are fuelling the blazes.
Scientists say that while almost all fires are man-made, recent hot and dry conditions caused by climate change are helping fires spread more quickly. South America has been hit by a series of heat waves since last year.
We never had wintersaid Karla Longo, air quality researcher at INPE, about the climate in Sao Paulo in recent months. It’s absurd.
Despite it still being winter in the southern hemisphere, high temperatures in Sao Paulo have remained above 32 degrees Celsius since Saturday.
In La Paz, hundreds of people demonstrated to demand measures against the fires, carrying banners and signs with slogans such as: Bolivia in flames and For cleaner air, stop burning.
Please realize what is happening in the country, we have lost millions of hectarescried Fernanda Negrón, an animal rights activist, at the protest with the slogan Millions of animals have been burned to death.
The highest number of fires this month was recorded in Brazil and Bolivia, followed by Peru, Argentina and Paraguay, according to INPE data.
Those caused by deforestation in the Amazon generate intense smoke.