The Amazon region accounted for 90% of the area with fire outbreaks in the first two months of the year.

By Letycia Bond – Reporter for Agência Brasil - São Paulo

In the first two months of this year, the Amazon biome accounted for 90% of the areas affected by fires. In total, the perimeter affected by the flames was 487 hectares, according to a report released this Monday (13) by the Fire Monitor, an initiative of the Annual Mapping Project of Land Use and Land Cover in Brazil (MapBiomas), in partnership with the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (Ipam). In the first two months of 2022, the area totaled 654 hectares.

Across the country's six biomes -- Amazon, Caatinga, Cerrado, Atlantic Forest, Pampa, and Pantanal -- fires affected 536 hectares. According to researcher Vera Arruda from Ipam, this area is 28% smaller than that recorded in the first two months of 2022.

According to researcher Vera, in general, the rains that characterize the first months of the year in the country favor a decrease in fires. "Even so, many hectares are burned during a period of more rain," says the researcher, who is part of the team responsible for the Fire Monitor.

Another peculiarity of the period is the high rate of occurrences in Roraima. The survey shows that the fires in the state consumed 259 hectares, or 48% of the total identified.

"There is a type of vegetation there that is more similar to the Cerrado. It's not just forests, like in most of the Amazon," explains Vera. In the states of Mato Grosso and Pará, the fires affected areas of 90 and 70 hectares, respectively. Together, if added to Roraima, they account for 79% of the fires detected by the project team.

The Cerrado is second on the list, with 24 hectares affected by fire. When asked what the team considers a margin of tolerance regarding fires in this biome, Vera comments that, in fact, the vegetation has adapted to the presence of fire.

The researcher, however, makes an observation: "The fires that occur today, in recent years, are no longer the fires that would naturally occur in the vegetation, because those would occur more due to lightning strikes. That is, more between seasons. More or less, from May to July. And we see that, in fact, the fires in the Cerrado are concentrated at the height of the dry season, between August and September, which are the most critical months for fires in the Cerrado. Most of the fires in the vegetation are of anthropogenic, human origin, not of natural origin."

"Furthermore, even fires that occur naturally would happen sporadically, not burning the same area repeatedly. What we see, with the Monitor's data, is that the frequency of burned areas in the Cerrado is also increasing. This prevents the vegetation, the ecosystem, from recovering," he concludes.