Brazil. Fire consumes the Pantanal and exposes the country’s inefficient environmental policy, experts say

This year the region suffers one of the worst droughts in decades, a problem aggravated by the inefficiency of the authorities in controlling the fire, usually caused by human action, which spreads quickly and reaches areas of difficult access.

The fires are also facilitated by the lack of inspection and preventive actions to prevent the fires from starting, according to experts consulted by Lusa.

“We noticed fire spots in the Pantanal even in January, an atypical time for the region because it is usually raining and you don’t have fires in that region […] This year Embrapa [Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária] from the Pantanal already finds that it is the worst drought in the last 47 years ”, explained Júlio Sampaio, leader of the WWF-Brazil Pantanal Initiative.

“It is a year in which there was very low rainfall, it rained less than half of what was expected for this region, the Paraguay River did not rise, it did not fill the Pantanal and what was left was a landscape formed by grasses, which in a very dry period become a fuel for environmental fires, ”added the expert.

Located in the central-west region, in the south of the Amazon, the Pantanal is a plain that has 80% of its area flooded in the rainy season and is considered a sanctuary where an extremely rich fauna is still preserved, including animals such as the jaguar and the blue macaw.

The largest area of ​​the Pantanal (62% or 150,355 square kilometers) is in Brazilian territory. About 20% of the biome (set of ecosystems) is located in the northern region of Paraguay and 18% in Bolivia.

Felipe Augusto Dias, executive director of the non-governmental organization SOS Pantanal, also cited extreme drought as a determining factor for fires.

“The plain [do Pantanal] it is flooded by water that comes from external areas. The rains happen in the high parts and seeps towards the plain […] the main source of this water is the Paraguay River, which overflows and slowly floods the area. What happened differently is that in January there was no flood [alta do rio provocada pela chuva] properly ”, he stressed.

“The fire that happens all year has expanded its area, today we already have more than one million and four hundred thousand hectares of burnt areas, according to data from the Environmental Satellite Applications Laboratory (LASA) of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ ) and unfortunately we do not yet have data on the impacts of this fire on vegetation ”, he added.

Data compiled by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), an organ of the Brazilian Government that monitors the territory by satellite, the number of fires in the Pantanal rose 228% this year, from 3,227 fires between January 1 and January 3. September 2019 to 10,595 fires in the same period of 2020.

Unlike the Amazon, the Brazilian Pantanal is divided into private properties (96%) where farmers develop agricultural activities adapted to the climate and conditions of the region for centuries and which traditionally coexist in harmony with the environment.

“We have about 85% of the Pantanal area with native vegetation. Livestock uses this ecosystem and there is a harmony between economic activity and the environmental aspect ”, stressed the director of SOS Pantanal.

Júlio Sampaio, from WWF-Brazil, recalled that although there is a good coexistence between human activity and the environment, fire is a tool used in working on land in the Pantanal and if it is applied without the attentive eye of public agents it can cause damage.

The two experts considered that the Brazilian Government’s action to avoid burning in the Pantanal as well as in other biomes in the country is inefficient.

“The Government is trying to cover the sun with a sieve. At the combat level, brigadiers and firefighters work hard to prevent the spread of flames, but they need better working structures, there should be a national brigade to fight fires […] Environmental policy in Brazil fails and everything that was reasonable and good in the country is deteriorating, ”said Felipe Augusto Dias.

The WWF-Brasil official stressed that environmental policy has been a critical portfolio since the beginning of the government of President Jair Bolsonaro and although there have been complaints inside and outside the country, adequate responses to criticisms and problems have not been given.

“In the Pantanal, the action comes late. The Minister [Ricardo Salles, do Meio Ambiente] and the President were in the region, they indicated resources to fight these fires, but there was no discussion about management and prevention models in the previous months ”, criticized the expert.

“The cost of putting out a fire in the Pantanal is much higher than implementing an efficient protection strategy, monitoring the fire in that region. What we expect are effective actions ”, he concluded.

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