Wildfires Devastated Huge Portions of Amazon in 2024

Thought Question: What are some things you do or could do in your daily life to help take care of the environment?

California is not the only place in the world suffering devastating losses from massive wildfires. In 2024, fires in Brazil destroyed about 116,000 square miles of land. That's an area roughly the size of Italy. 

Those figures come from a new report by MapBiomas, a group that studies wildfires. Brazil’s fires largely resulted from a severe drought last year, made worse by the El Niño weather pattern and climate change. Blazes set by farmers on purpose to clear land also played a part.     

The lost vegetation represented a 79% increase in land lost to wildfires from the year before, the group said. Much of the vegetation lost was in the Amazon rainforest.

“It was an absurd increase,” Ane Alencar told the Guardian. She's the coordinator of MapBiomas. She said that, for the first time, forested areas were the most impacted. In that past it's been grasslands and pastures. “Once a forest is hit by fire, it takes years and years to recover,” Alencar explained.

Adding to the problem was a lack of water. Once the 2024 fires ignited, fire crews could not find enough water to contain them. Low river water levels in the Amazon region, also due to drought, caused a water shortage. 

The fires are greatly threatening large parts of the Amazon. It's the biggest tropical rainforest on Earth. It spans 2.5 million square miles across several South American countries. The frequency of the fires is making it impossible for thousands of miles of the rainforest to grow back. Experts worry that those sections of the forest will be lost forever.  

Alencar is concerned that 2025 won’t offer any relief. “We would need a very strong rainy season to truly replenish the soil," she told the Guardian. "That hasn’t happened yet.”