The fires that are devouring Brazil and Portugal have simultaneously brought to the news two countries that share a language and a history. One is gigantic, with a continental territory 90 times larger than its former mother country. The comparison of the means with which each one fights the fire cruelly reflects Brazil’s weakness in the face of the worst fire crisis since 2010. The Brazilian environmental agency has deployed some 4,000 firefighters (more than ever), 22 aircraft and a thousand vehicles. Meanwhile, in Portugal there are 6,500 firefighters, 42 aircraft and 1,900 vehicles. Even the president has admitted the lack of preparation. The reaction of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his government “is a timid, insufficient and late response that is far from the aggressiveness of the fires and environmental crimes,” says Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, which brings together some 120 Brazilian NGOs, in an interview.
Three months after devastating floods inundated Rio Grande do Sul, the climate emergency is looming again. Brazil has been burning for two and a half months in fires fueled by a historic drought — the worst in seven decades — and by organized crime, which took advantage of Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency to strengthen itself with impunity in the Amazon and other ecosystems. A few days before spring begins in the Southern Hemisphere, smoke covers 60% of the national territory. The fires are around 190,000, double the number in 2023, according to data from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE). It is known that fires have increased greenhouse gas emissions by 60% in the last quarter, but it is unknown how many victims they have caused. This wave of fires is, quantitatively, worse than that of the first year of Bolsonaro’s mandate, which turned him into a planetary environmental villain.
Astrini says that in 2019, the Bolsonaro government sat back (even rejecting help from the G7) but there was no drought as extreme as the current one. “Now there is a response from the government, but it is late. The executive is neither materially nor mentally prepared to face the climate crisis. They did not believe that this was going to happen,” says the head of the Climate Observatory. He stresses that the president’s first meeting with his ministers to exclusively address the fire crisis was held last Monday, when the environmental catastrophe was already of enormous proportions.
A scientist took part in the meeting to explain the serious situation. Lula then announced an extraordinary allocation of 514 million reais (85 million euros, 95 million dollars) to fight the fire and the drought. The president also gave in to the evidence: “The concrete fact is that today, in Brazil, we were not 100% prepared to deal with these things.” [eventos climáticos extremos]. 90% of cities are not prepared. Few states are prepared [suficiente]Civil Defense, firefighters and brigade members, almost nobody has…”. With this extra money, Brazil plans to rent aircraft, hire brigade members, mobilize more military and police officers and provide food aid to those affected.
Most of those fighting the flames on the front line are brigade members from small local communities, including indigenous people. Professionals who do not improvise, as stressed this week to The Globe the president of Ibama, the government agency for the environment. “Many people think that hiring firefighters and brigade members is easy. You can’t hire someone without experience, it’s extremely dangerous. We need to select and train them,” explained Rodrigo Agostinho. In addition to calling for more investment, he warned that the number of professionals deployed is a record, but that this entails logistical difficulties in transporting or feeding them. Brazil’s size is always a challenge, it is twice that of the European Union.
Here, as elsewhere on the planet, climatic events are multiplying and becoming more virulent each season. Last June, floods inundated the state of Rio Grande do Sul for weeks, killing around 200 people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless.
The wave of fires is so serious that residents of Brasilia, Porto Velho and hundreds of other Brazilian cities only have to open their windows to know that the crisis is not abating. Respiratory problems have skyrocketed; among those affected, a Supreme Court judge has been hospitalised with lung inflammation. Images from the European Copernicus satellite show a bright red tongue of pollution over western South America that crosses the Atlantic. The situation is also critical in Bolivia, Venezuela, Peru…
President Lula and the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Marina Silva, suspect that criminals are behind this devastating wave of fires. Environmentalists agree that these are intentional fires because, as Astrini explains, in the areas of the Amazon where the vegetation is healthy, the humidity is so high that it does not ignite. And, in the ecosystems of the Cerrado and the Pantanal, there have been no storms with lightning for more than a month. So these are fires caused by humans, either to illegally create areas of pasture or crops or by bonfires that have gotten out of control. As the crisis worsened, governors have banned all fires, even traditional forest management ones.
The 2019 wave began with a day of fire called by Bolsonaro-supporting farmers. Five years later, no one has been punished. And now the government wants to toughen the penalties for arsonists, but Congress is resisting. The anti-environmental lobby is getting stronger and more influential with each legislature. In any case, the accusations of arsonism made in recent years are just a drop in the ocean compared to the magnitude of the tragedy. A hundred cases a year at most when the fires are counted in the tens of thousands.
The government’s room for maneuver is limited by the restrictions imposed by the deficit target and because a large part of the powers fall to the states. Many governors boycott federal efforts or resist adopting strong measures, either because of complicity with organized crime that plunders the forest, because of their agreement with Bolsonaro’s anti-environmentalist discourse, because of a lack of resources, or because of a combination of factors. But the federal government has not even adopted a firm position of coordination.
Environmental NGOs point to a significant and serious change. This time, living vegetation is also burning, not just areas that have already been cut down and severely degraded. Brazilian environmentalists are aware that the authorities cannot prevent the drought, but they can try to catch criminals who have so far gone unpunished. They add that putting out fires should be the exception; the ideal thing would be to prevent them.
This Wednesday, Brazil expressed its solidarity with Portugal over the fires in a note from the Foreign Ministry. After lamenting the deaths and material losses, Lula’s government made “a call to allied countries to redouble their efforts to adapt to the impacts of climate change in order to deal with the multiplication of extreme natural events.”
