By Leonardo Benassato
CORUMBA, Brazil (Reuters) – As José Cleiton and Brandão Amilton ride across the vast wetlands of Brazil’s Pantanal, a wall of smoke rises from the horizon into the sky.
The worst of the dry season is still far away, but these Brazilian wetlands are already so dry that forest fires are on the rise.
The number of fires in the Pantanal so far this year has increased tenfold compared to the same period last year, according to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE).
“It’s hard to breathe. It’s hard for the newborns. The heat gets stronger and stronger,” said Amilton, a local fishing guide. “The Pantanal is already hot and it gets hotter, drier, with smoke, the weather gets very bad.”
The men herd the cattle across the floodplain, hoping for a better chance of survival. “The way the fire is coming, it could surround them and burn them to death,” said Cleiton, a farmer.
The wetlands of the Pantanal, approximately 10 times larger than the Florida marshes, are home to jaguars, tapirs, caimans and giant anteaters. Light rains since late last year have disrupted the usual seasonal flooding, leaving much of the region vulnerable to fires.
As the region approaches the riskiest time for wildfires, which typically peak in September, experts warn that the fires so far this year are worse than the start of a record 2020, when a third of the Pantanal burned.
More than 3,400 square kilometers (1,315 square miles) of the Pantanal were burned between January 1 and June 9, the highest level ever recorded, according to the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro’s satellite monitoring program, with data that date back to 2012.
The contrast with the record floods in Rio Grande do Sul, three states to the south, may be shocking, but scientists say they are part of the same phenomenon – an unusually strong El Niño pattern, worsened by climate change.
“Climate change has supercharged El Nino,” said Michael Coe, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. “Now we are in a different realm.”
(Reporting by Leonardo Benassatto; text by Dani Morera Trettin; editing by Brad Haynes and Sandra Maler)
