Brazil: legislating environmental disaster
Almost a quarter of a million forest fires were detected in Brazil in 2015 – and the main cause of a huge increase is being attributed to climate change that brought about a year-long drought in much of the country.
Satellite data revealed a 27.5% increase in forest fires last year, compared with the previous year. The total number was 235,629, almost as high as the record of 249,291 in 2010.
Dr Alberto Setzer, co-ordinator of the Nucleus for Forest Fires at INPE − Brazil’s national space research institute, which monitors deforestation − says: “This (2015) was a year with less rain, and hotter than the historic average, especially in central Brazil, in the south of the Amazon region and in parts of the Northeast. Some regions registered temperatures 4°C above the average.”
Brail's forests under threat
These conditions favour the spread of fires, but Dr Setzer emphasises that it was not spontaneous combustion that caused the fires. “It was human activity, whether carelessness or deliberate,” he says.
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