‘Worst of
wildfires still to come’ despite Brazil claiming crisis is under control
Forestry
expert warns annual burning season had yet to fully play out and calls for
urgent steps to reduce potential damage
Tom
Phillips Latin America correspondent
Wed 28 Aug
2019 21.26 BST First published on Wed 28 Aug 2019 16.25 BST
The fires
raging in the Brazilian Amazon are likely to intensify over the coming weeks, a
leading environmental expert has warned, despite government claims the
situation had been controlled.
About
80,000 blazes have been detected in Brazil this year – more than half in the
Amazon region – although on Saturday the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro,
claimed the situation was “returning to normal”.
On Monday
Brazil’s defense minister, Fernando Azevedo e Silva, told reporters: “The
situation is not straightforward but it’s under control and already cooling
down nicely.”
But in an
article for Brazil’s O Globo newspaper on Wednesday, one prominent forestry
expert warned that the country’s annual burning season had yet to fully play
out and called for urgent steps to reduce the potential damage.
“The worst of the fire is still to come,”
wrote Tasso Azevedo, a forest engineer and environmentalist who coordinates the
deforestation monitoring group MapBiomas.
Azevedo
said many of the areas currently being consumed by flames were stretches of
Amazon rainforest that had been torn down in the months of April, May and June.
But areas deforested in July and August – when government monitoring systems
detected a major surge in destruction – had yet to be torched.
The Brazilian
Amazon lost 1,114.8 sq km (430 sq miles) – an area equivalent to Hong Kong – in
the first 26 days of August, according to preliminary data from the
government’s satellite monitoring agency. An area half the size of Philadelphia
was reportedly lost in July, with Brazilian media denouncing an “explosion” of
devastation in the Amazon.
Azevedo
wrote: “What we are experiencing is a genuine crisis which could become a
tragedy foretold with much larger fires than the ones we are now seeing if they
are not immediately halted.”
He called
for urgent measures such as a crackdown on deforestation in indigenous
territories and conservation units and outlawing deliberate burning in the
Amazon until at least the end of October when the dry season ends.
That
warning came after more than 400 members of Brazil’s environmental agency,
Ibama, published a damning open letter about the state of environmental
protection under Bolsonaro, a rightwing nationalist who took power in January
vowing to open up the Amazon to development.
In the
letter to Ibama’s president, Eduardo Bim, employees said they felt it was their
duty to publicly voice their “immense concern” about the direction environment
protection was taking.
“The rates
of Amazon forest destruction will not be reduced unless a firm stand is taken
against environmental crimes,” they wrote.
Campaigners
accuse Bolsonaro’s administration of hamstringing the very agency that should
be fighting illegal deforestation and giving the green-light to environmental
criminals with his pro-development rhetoric.
On
Wednesday Reuters reported that, despite the spike in deforestation, an elite
squad of Ibama operatives – called the Grupo Especializado de Fiscalização or
Specialized Inspection Group – had not been deployed to the Amazon once in
2019.
At a summit
of Amazon governors on Tuesday – supposedly convened to discuss responses to
the fires – Bolsonaro repeatedly attacked environmentalists and indigenous
activists who he claimed were holding back Brazil’s economy.
Many,
though not all, of the Amazon governors backed Bolsonaro’s vision for the
region.
“The Amazon
is still on fire but Jair Bolsonaro has managed to show he is not alone,”
Bernardo Mello Franco wrote in O Globo on Wednesday. “In a meeting at the
presidential palace, most of the region’s governors also made it clear they
couldn’t give a monkey’s about the forest.”
Bolsonaro
confirmed on Wednesday that he would attend a meeting with other South American
leaders in neighbouring Colombia on 6 September, in order to draw up a
coordinated response to the crisis.
The
meeting, announced on Tuesday will seek to draw up a plan to protect the Amazon
rainforest, which straddles Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador,
Bolivia, Guyana and Suriname.
On
Wednesday 18 global fashion brands including Timberland, Vans and The North
Face were reported to have suspended leather purchases from Brazil over the
crisis.
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