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Brazilian Amazon fires surge in July
By Joshua Howat Berger
Rio De Janeiro (AFP) Aug 1, 2020

Wildfire forces dozens to evacuate French surfing hotspot
Anglet, France (AFP) July 31, 2020 - A dramatic forest fire in the middle of a French coastal resort was contained early Friday after destroying nearly a dozen homes and forcing around 100 people to evacuate overnight, officials said.

The blaze erupted late Thursday in the Chiberta forest park at Anglet in southwest France, whose beaches just north of Biarritz draw surfers from around the world.

Soaring temperatures that reached nearly 42 degrees Celsius (107 Fahrenheit) fanned the flames that burned 165 hectares (400 acres) in total.

"The fire is under control, things have improved since last night though there are still two or three hot spots, so there's still a risk it could flare up again," Anglet's mayor, Claude Olive, told AFP.

The local prefecture said 11 homes were destroyed and five more rendered uninhabitable, and 16 people were treated for smoke inhalation, including one firefighter and several police officers.

Acrid smoke enveloped the city as around 130 firefighters battled the blaze, whose cause remains unknown, Olive said.

Residents described an inferno that spread quickly through the closely packed pine trees, which like much of France's Basque Country had seen extremely dry conditions this summer.

"At the end of my street the flames were approaching the homes and they were very strong -- we all jumped in our cars," one local told AFP.

A young woman evacuated from her boyfriend's apartment said everything appeared fine at 8 pm.

"Then at 8.30 pm we were told 'Everyone come out! The tide has turned'," she recalled in tears.

"I had the flames 10 metres (33 feet) away!" said another resident, adding that "usually there is never stong wind here."

The blaze was the latest of several that erupted in southern and central France this week, kicking off the annual fire season which officials warn could be worsened by the drought and dry heat.

Last year, some 15,000 acres went up in flames across France, "and now the entire country is regularly affected," Gregory Allione of the FNSPF firefighters' association said in early July.

The number of forest fires in the Brazilian Amazon last month rose 28 percent from July 2019, satellite data showed Saturday, fueling fears the world's biggest rainforest will again be devastated by fires this year.

Brazil's national space agency, INPE, identified 6,803 fires in the Amazon region in July 2020, up from 5,318 the year before.

The figure is all the more troubling given that 2019 was already a devastating year for fires in the Amazon, triggering global outcry.

That has put pressure on Brazil, which holds around 60 percent of the Amazon basin region, to do more to protect the massive forest, seen as vital to containing the impact of climate change.

The fires are largely set to clear land illegally for farming, ranching and mining.

Activists accuse Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right climate change skeptic, of encouraging the deforestation with calls to open up the rainforest to agriculture and industry.

Under international pressure, Bolsonaro has deployed the army to fight the fires and declared a moratorium on burning. But activists say that does not go far enough to address the roots of the problem.

Fires rose 77 percent on indigenous lands and 50 percent on protected nature reserves from July 2019, environmental group Greenpeace said, showing how illegal activities are increasingly encroaching on those areas.

On July 30 alone, satellites detected 1,007 fires in the Amazon, INPE said.

That was the worst single day for fires in the month of July since 2005, said Greenpeace.

"More than 1,000 fires in a single day is a 15-year record and shows the government's strategy of media-spectacle operations is not working on the ground," Greenpeace spokesman Romulo Batista said in a statement.

"On paper, the fire moratorium prohibits burning, but it only works if there is also a response on the ground, with more patrols. Criminals aren't known for obeying the law."

Instead, the Bolsonaro administration has slashed the budget, staff and programs of environmental authority IBAMA.

"Everything that was working was thrown out the window," Erika Berenguer, an Amazon ecologist at Oxford and Lancaster Universities, told AFP.

- 'Conditions ripe' -

Fire season in the Amazon typically runs from around June to October.

But fires are just part of the deforestation picture.

The rest of the year, ranchers, farmers, miners and land speculators are clearing forest and preparing to burn it.

The first six months of 2020 were the worst on record for deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, with 3,069 square kilometers (1,185 square miles) cleared, according to INPE data -- an area bigger than the nation of Luxembourg.

If a significant portion of those felled trees burn in 2020, the result could be catastrophic, experts warn.

"I think August will be the make-or-break month," said Berenguer.

Last year, the number of fires surged nearly 200 percent year-on-year in August, to 30,900, sending a thick haze of black smoke all the way to Sao Paulo, thousands of kilometers away, and causing worldwide alarm.

The number of fires has fallen since then, under increased scrutiny and pressure -- including from companies and investors worried about the impact on Brazil's brand.

But Berenguer said it was a matter of time before the newly deforested land went up in flames in the name of farming and ranching.

"It's an economic investment to deforest. It's expensive.... You need heavy machinery: bulldozers, tractors, people, diesel," she said.

"You don't deforest to leave all those trees on the ground. You need to burn it, because you need to recover your investment."

Furthermore, US space agency NASA warned last month that warmer ocean surface temperatures in the North Atlantic mean the southern Amazon is facing a major drought this year.

It said that made "human-set fires used for agriculture and land clearing more prone to growing out of control and spreading."

"Conditions are ripe," it said.

Exacerbating the situation this year, experts say the resulting smoke risks causing a spike in respiratory emergencies in a region already hit hard by COVID-19.

Brazil has more infections and deaths from the new coronavirus than any country except the United States: more than 2.6 million and 92,000, respectively.


Related Links
Forest and Wild Fires - News, Science and Technology


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Estimated 3 billion animals affected by Australia bushfires: study
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Nearly three billion animals were killed or displaced by Australia's unprecedented 2019-20 wildfires in "one of the worst wildlife disasters in modern history", according to a report released Tuesday. The study by scientists from several Australian universities said the wildlife hit included 143 million mammals, 2.46 billion reptiles, 180 million birds and 51 million frogs. While the report did not say how many animals died because of the fires, the prospects for those that escaped the flames "w ... read more

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