The devastation caused by fire in the Pantanal has reached a new alarming level. From January until Tuesday (11), 372,000 hectares were hit by fires, an area larger than two São Paulo cities.
This extent is 54% larger than the area affected by fires in the same period in 2020—considered the worst year for wildfires in the biome—when 241,700 hectares burned by this date.
The data comes from the Laboratory for Application of Environmental Satellites, Department of Meteorology at UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro).
By Friday (14), the biome had already seen 2,019 fire outbreaks in 2024, according to the BD Queimadas platform from Inpe (National Institute for Space Research). In comparison, there were 133 outbreaks during the same period in 2023.
Despite the current larger area of devastation, there were more fire outbreaks during the same period in 2020, totaling 2,206.
Experts attribute the situation to severe drought in the biome, which has persisted in recent years and has been exacerbated by the El Niño climate phenomenon, as well as a lack of coordination for preventive actions against fires.