topic: wildfires

topic: wildfires

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On a Borneo mountainside, Indigenous Dayak women hold fire and defend forest
- Indigenous women in Indonesian Borneo often have to combine domestic responsibilities with food cultivation, known as behuma in the dialect of the Dayak Pitap community in South Kalimantan province.
- Swidden agriculture relies on burning off discarded biomass before planting land in order to fertilize soil and limit pest infestations. But a law enforcement campaign to tackle wildfires has seen criminal prosecutions of at least 11 Borneo women for using fire to grow small-scale food crops from 2018-2022.
- Dayak women and several fieldworkers say the practice of burning is safe owing to cultural safeguards against fires spreading that have been passed down families for centuries.
- Indonesia’s 2009 Environment Law included a stipulation that farmers cultivating food on less than 2 hectares (5 acres) were exempt from prosecution, but Mongabay analysis shows prosecutors and police have pressed charges against small farmers using other laws.

Amid ravaging wildfires in Venezuela, experts cite institutional collapse
- Since the start of the year, Venezuela has been experiencing record-breaking fires. Apart from the highest number of fires in any January and February for the last two decades, wildfires continued all the way to early May, devastating national parks and affecting the capital of Caracas.
- Some experts say that in 2024 so far, up to 2 million hectares (4.94 million acres) of land appear to have already burned.
- Higher temperatures, drought and the fact that Venezuela lacks fire-tolerating plants have been contributing to more intense fires, which have been made worse by the country’s institutional failures.
- Experts say that a lack of adequate institutions, a collapse of public services and an absence of planning and monitoring strategies have resulted in Venezuela being unable to handle the wildfires.

Warming climate threatens to worsen air quality in already polluted Kathmandu
- In the period between winter and spring each year, Kathmandu faces severe air pollution that affects thousands of residents with health problems like burning eyes, respiratory discomfort, and even death.
- Local sources like vehicle emissions and construction dust, compounded by Kathmandu’s geography, are the main drivers of the pollution, and rising global temperatures threaten to worsen the situation.
- Changes in weather patterns, including reduced rainfall and prolonged dry periods are among the changes that could make air pollution an even more severe problem than it already is.
- Wildfires, both natural and human-induced, contribute significantly to air pollution in Kathmandu, especially during the transition period between weather systems, which could become longer due to rising temperatures.

Amid record-high fires across the Amazon, Brazil loses primary forests
- The number of fires shows no signs of easing as Brazil’s Roraima faces unprecedented blazes, and several Amazonian countries, including Guyana, Suriname and Venezuela, registered record-high outbreaks in the first quarter this year.
- Fire outbreaks in primary (old-growth) forest in Brazil’s Amazon soared by 152% in 2023, according to a recent study, rising from 13,477 in 2022 to 34,012 in 2023.
- Fires in the mature forest regions are the leading drivers of degradation of the Amazon Rainforest because the biome hasn’t evolved to adapt to such blazes, according to the researchers.
- The fires are a result of a drought that has been fueled by climate change and worsened by natural weather phenomena, such as El Niño, which has intensified dry conditions already aggravated by high temperatures across the world, experts say.

Tropical forest loss puts 2030 zero-deforestation target further out of reach
- The overall rate of primary forest loss across the tropics remained stubbornly high in 2023, putting the world well off track from its net-zero deforestation target by 2030, according to a new report from the World Resources Institute.
- The few bright spots were Brazil and Colombia, where changes in political leadership helped drive down deforestation rates in the Amazon.
- Elsewhere, however, several countries hit record-high rates of forest loss, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bolivia and Laos, driven largely by agriculture, mining and fires.
- The report authors call for “bold global mechanisms and unique local initiatives … to achieve enduring reductions in deforestation across all tropical front countries.”

Traditional Aboriginal fire practices can help promote plant diversity: Study
- While research is still mixed on whether diverse fire patterns promote biodiversity, a new study suggests that practices under active Indigenous stewardship can do so.
- The study draws a reference to Aboriginal Martu peoples in the northwest deserts of Australia, who have an ancient history of fire practices and experience used to manage the land and hunt.
- Martu fire patterns and post-fire stages help influence plant richness and diversity in arid landscapes dominated by spinifex, say the authors say.
- Indigenous burning practices are often carried out during cooler times of the year, such as in the winter for the Martu, which resulted results in slow, cool, and low-intensity fires that reduced the potential for fire burning out of control and into becoming wildfires.

Megafires are spreading in the Amazon — and they are here to stay
- Wildfires consuming more than 100 square kilometers (38 square miles) of tropical rainforest shouldn’t happen, yet they are becoming more and more frequent.
- Because of its intense humidity and tall trees, fire does not occur spontaneously in the Amazon; usually accidental, forest fires are caused by uncontrolled small fires coming from crop burning, livestock management or clear-cutting.
- Scientists say the rainforest is becoming increasingly flammable, even in areas not directly related to deforestation; fire is now spreading faster and higher, reaching more than 10 meters (32 feet) in height.

Indonesian palm oil firm fined for fires sues expert a second time over testimony
- Environmental law experts say palm oil company PT Jatim Jaya Perkasa (JJP) is attempting to shirk its liability and fines for a forest fire by suing an expert witness who testified against it.
- The lawsuit is the second that JJP has filed against Bambang Hero Saharjo, an expert on fire forensics at the Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB); the company dropped its previous lawsuit against him in 2018.
- The company blames Bambang, who testified about the extent of the fire damage on JJP’s concession, for the high amount that it was fined, saying his testimony was “false and exaggerated.”
- Bambang and fellow experts refute this, saying JJP’s repeated lawsuits are a frivolous attempt to avoid having to take responsibility or to pay; to date, the company hasn’t paid any of the $36.7 million that it was fined for the fire.

2023 fires increase fivefold in Indonesia amid El Niño
- Nearly 1 million hectares (2.47 million acres, an area 15 times the size of Jakarta) burned in Indonesia between January and October 2023, according to environment and forest ministry data; El Niño and burning for new plantations contributed to this.
- 2023 was the worst fire season since 2019, when that year’s El Niño brought a prolonged dry season and fires so severe, they sent billowing smoke across Malaysia and Singapore.
- In the absence of local jobs, some people burn abandoned farmlands and turn them into new plantations as a way to make a living and survive.

Do tree-planting projects on grasslands increase fire risk?
- Global tree-planting initiatives, aimed at storing carbon from the atmosphere, could include plantations in fire-prone African savannas.
- 58% of tree plantations grown in South African grasslands between 1980 and 2019 burned, polluting water and releasing carbon dioxide back into the air.
- As efforts to plant trees for carbon storage in Africa expand, researchers suggest cutting fossil-fuel emissions would be a better approach — but scientists are hotly debating the issue.

As U.S. insurers stop covering prescribed burns, states and communities step up
- Prescribed fires are a positive land management method, but when the flames occasionally escape control, the resulting damage to land and private property also hurts this conservation tool’s reputation.
- U.S. insurance companies are thus charging increasingly unaffordable premiums for coverage of this activity or are dropping the service altogether in the wake of some particularly large recent accidents.
- As a result, many small conservation groups and private businesses are getting out of the habit of using fire to improve grassland health, boost wildlife habitat, and decrease likelihood of catastrophic wildfires.
- California is bridging this gap with a new state program that insures the activity, while prescribed fire associations, where residents and firefighters cooperate to carry out burns on private land, are increasingly popping up in communities.

Burn now, pay later: Fines trickle in from Indonesia’s crackdown on forest fires
- Ten years since a landmark lawsuit over forest fires, the palm oil company at the center of the case has finally begun paying its $23 million fine in installments.
- The case against PT Kallista Alam (KA) was supposed to set an example for how the government is cracking down on companies that allow burning in their concessions, but has instead highlighted the difficulty of collecting on the fines.
- KA has paid just $3.6 million of its total fine, and despite a 2021 regulation barring fine payments in installments, the company has been allowed to stagger its payments over time.
- The company is one of 22 sued by the government since 2013 for fires; 14 of these have been found liable and ordered to pay a combined 5.6 trillion rupiah ($353 million), but only one has paid in full.

As fire season worsens, Indonesian activists report four companies for burning

JAKARTA — Activists have reported four companies — two industrial forest firms and two palm oil firms — to the local police over fires in their concessions in Central Kalimantan as Indonesia is grappling with its worst fire episode since 2019. According to satellite image analysis done Sept. 2-10, the activists found a total of […]
In Venezuela, a mysterious fire sparks concerns for rare mountain wildlife
- A fire on the top of Mount Roraima in Venezuela has baffled scientists, park guards and local community leaders, who have never seen a fire in the area and worry that the rare mountain ecosystem could face increasing threats.
- A photography expedition encountered a mysterious fire that may have been manmade, a lightning strike — or something much more spectacular.
- More resources are needed to educate tourists and locals about the tepuy ecosystem, as well as to monitor human behavior there, experts said.

Jaguar haven in Brazil’s Pantanal burns amid ‘new normal’ of wildfires
- Wildfires scorched a fifth of the Pantanal’s Encontro das Águas State Park, home to the highest concentration of jaguars in Brazil.
- After a month of roaring fires, a downpour of rain put out the worst of the flames, but experts are warning of further fire risks from underground embers and hot days ahead.
- The fires spell disaster for the Pantanal’s ecosystems, which are struggling to recover from an onslaught of unpredictable and increasingly frequent fires that experts associate with climate change.
- Environmentalists have called for more effective preventive measures, increased government investment, and stronger coordination between state and federal authorities to strengthen Pantanal protection.

People and nature suffer as historic drought fuels calamitous Amazon fires
- The state of Amazonas, the largest in Brazil, recorded 3,181 fires from Oct. 1-23, an all-time record for this month, according to monitoring by Brazil’s space agency, INPE.
- Surrounded by fires, Manaus, the state capital, has been shrouded in a thick layer of smoke, increasing the number of medical emergencies for respiratory problems.
- Researchers writing in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution say fires have become the main factor in the degradation of the Brazilian Amazon, threatening to undo the results of environmental protection policies.
- Water levels in the Solimões, Negro, Madeira and other great Amazonian rivers have dropped to unprecedented levels, forcing families to live on boats and drag themselves through the mud in search of water and food.

Indonesian children locked out of school as El Niño haze chokes parts of Sumatra & Kalimantan
- Poor air quality over several Indonesian cities and outlying rural areas has forced local authorities to cut class times or close schools altogether.
- Air pollution on Oct. 5 in one area of Palangkaraya far exceeded the level at which air quality is classified dangerous to human health.
- The government of Jambi province has closed schools until Oct. 7, after which it will review whether to reopen for in-person teaching.

Indonesia’s peatland restoration claims in question as fires flare up
- The Indonesian government says companies have restored 3.7 million hectares (9.1 million acres) of peatland — an area larger than Belgium — in an effort to prevent the annual peat fires.
- But this claim has come into question following an increase in the number of hotspots in peatlands, including inside oil palm concessions that had burned in past years and went up in flames again this year.
- An investigation by The Gecko Project found the government appeared to have inflated the figure of 3.7 million hectares, with the actual figure derived from the government’s own methodology closer to 2.7 million hectares (6.7 million acres).
- Fires on carbon-rich peatlands are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions from Indonesia, which in turn is one of the world’s biggest emitters.

Experts slam massive ‘discount’ in fines for Indonesian palm oil billionaire
- Environmental experts have criticized an Indonesian court ruling that extends a palm oil billionaire’s sentence for corruption by just one year while slashing his fines by nearly 95%.
- The country’s highest court of appeal upheld the initial conviction of Surya Darmadi for conspiring with a local official to illegally obtain licenses for his oil palm plantation, but cut his fines from $2.7 billion to just $144 million.
- Experts who testified in Surya’s prosecution say the latest ruling sets a bad precedent for future law enforcement against corruption and environmental crimes in the country.
- And without fines, they warn, there can be no efforts to recover the carbon-rich and biodiverse peat ecosystems in Sumatra that Surya’s plantations destroyed.

As fires threaten Indonesian forests, actions like agroforestry promotion are needed (commentary)
- Indonesia contains the world’s third largest swath of rainforest, but the country’s forested areas have been declining sharply each year.
- Alongside the usual causes, fire has also become a significant driver of deforestation: since 2001, fires have accounted for 10% of forest loss, and this trend is currently intensifying amid the El Niño weather phenomenon, which brings drier conditions.
- “Promoting and supporting agroforestry, alongside other sustainable land use practices, can be a powerful step toward preserving Indonesia’s forests, mitigating climate change, and safeguarding the well-being of both local communities and the global environment,” a new op-ed via the country’s Ministry of Finance argues.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

Indigenous peoples undersupported on frontline of hotter, drier, fiery world
- It’s official: This has been the warmest June-July-August on record, and much attention has focused on the urgent need to achieve climate resilience in impacted urban areas. But how are rural Indigenous communities around the world living with these new extremes?
- Indigenous peoples — from Africa to the Arctic to Central America — report unprecedented heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfires, extremes that are impacting the wildlife they hunt, the plants they gather, crops they grow, livestock they raise, and their very survival.
- Given that many Indigenous peoples live close to the land and depend directly on local resources, they’re especially vulnerable to the massive changes now sweeping our planet.
- But while Indigenous peoples are considered by many researchers and activists to be Earth’s best land stewards, their communities aren’t receiving the funding or resources necessary to adapt to a hotter, drier, stormier, fiery world, often due to the lack of access to their traditional lands.

Palm oil, pulpwood firms not doing enough to prevent peat fires, analysis shows
- More than 2 million hectares (5 million acres) of oil palm, pulpwood and other concessions across Indonesia are at high risk of being burned because of companies’ failure to restore the peat landscape, according to a new analysis.
- This represents more than half of the Switzerland-sized area of tropical peatland throughout Indonesia that’s considered a high fire risk.
- With many concession holders still not doing enough to restore the peat landscapes in their concessions, researchers question the effectiveness of government mandates and certification schemes in preventing peat fires.
- The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) credits its early fire detection system with helping member concessions achieve lower numbers of hotspots than noncertified concessions, but groups like Greenpeace dispute the findings.

Indonesian oil palm firm slapped with $61m fine for fires on its plantation
- Indonesia’s Supreme Court has upheld a $61 million fine against palm oil company PT Rafi Kamajaya Abadi for fires on its oil palm plantation in western Borneo.
- The fires burned an area spanning 2,560 hectares (6,326 acres), or more than seven times the size of New York City’s Central Park.
- To date, the Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forestry has filed lawsuits against 22 companies for fires on their concessions, 13 of which have been found liable and must pay fines after exhausting all avenues of appeal.

Muslim women’s group to reopen oxygen homes if Indonesia wildfires intensify
- In 2019, volunteers with the environmental wing of Indonesia’s largest Islamic women’s organization, ‘Aisyiyiah, operated “Rumah Oksigen,” homes equipped with air purifiers and first aid.
- This year as El Niño strengthens, ‘Aisyiyah will advise members to reopen the facilities for the young, old and those most susceptible to air pollution generated by wildfires.
- The volunteers will also work to raise awareness in the community on how families can best protect themselves.

Virtual fences can benefit both ranchers and wildlife
- Virtual fencing manages livestock using GPS-linked collars to train animals to stay within a set boundary, similar to an invisible dog fence.
- Coupled with the removal of existing barbed-wire fencing, it could open up whole landscapes for wildlife by removing injurious barriers for migratory herds, reducing mortality from fence strikes for numerous bird species, and protecting sensitive habitats from trampling by cattle.
- Virtual fences are easily moved with a tap on an app, and can be used to improve pasture management through rotational grazing, reduce wildfire risk, and other benefits.
- These systems are cheaper than building and maintaining physical fences, and are already in use in the U.S., U.K., Australia and Norway.

New Tree Tech: Cutting-edge drones give reforestation a helping hand
- This four-part Mongabay mini-series examines the latest technological solutions to help tree-planting projects achieve scale and long-term efficiency. Using these innovative approaches could be vital for meeting international targets to repair degraded ecosystems, sequester carbon, and restore biodiversity.
- Restoring hundreds of millions of hectares of lost and degraded forest worldwide will require a gigantic effort, a challenge made doubly hard by the fact that many sites are inaccessible by road, stopping manual replanting projects in their tracks.
- Manual planting is labor-intensive and slow. Drone seeding uses the latest in robotic technology to deliver seeds directly to where they’re needed. Drones can drop seeds along a predefined route, working together in a “swarm” to complete the task with a single human supervisor overseeing the process.
- Drone-dropped seed success rates are lower than for manually planted seedlings, but biotech solutions are helping. Specially designed pods encase the seeds in a tailored mix of nutrients to help them thrive. Drones are tech-intensive, and still available mostly in industrialized countries, but could one day help reseed forests worldwide.

Nearly 85% of Indonesian peatlands aren’t protected, study shows
- This article has been withdrawn from publication by Mongabay.

Tested by COVID and war, an Indigenous conservation system in Ethiopia prevails
- For more than 400 years, communities in the Guassa grasslands of Ethiopia’s central highlands have practiced a sustainable system for managing the area’s natural resources.
- The system’s robustness was severely tested from 2020 with the one-two punch of COVID-19 and the Tigray war, but held strong.
- Threats to the grassland persist, however, from a growing population and road projects, which the community hopes to address through ecotourism initiatives as an alternative source of income.
- The Guassa Community Conservation Area is home to rare plant and wildlife species such as gelada baboons, Ethiopian wolves, and the versatile guassa grass that’s a central part of community life.

In Chile, a wildlife rehab center deals with the aftermath of worsening fires
- Wildfires at the beginning of this year in Chile were some of the deadliest on record, destroying nearly 500,000 hectares (1.2 million acres) of land and killing people and wildlife.
- At a wildlife rescue center in the city of Chillán, volunteer vets have been treating wildlife brought in with burns and other injuries, and releasing them back into their habitat wherever possible.
- But with much of the wildlife habitat severely damaged by the fires, the number of locations fit for wild rereleases is limited.
- Ecologists blame the intensifying fires on the combination of climate change, the spread of fire-prone eucalyptus and confer plantations, and deliberate burning.

Woodpeckers for fire recovery? A new online tool tells you how
- An online tool maps and predicts the presence of black-backed woodpeckers (Picoides arcticus) in newly burned forests in California.
- The tool aims to aid fire managers in incorporating the protection of these birds into their efforts to revive burned forests.
- Black-backed woodpeckers thrive in the diverse ecosystem left behind by wildfires, but fire suppression efforts and salvage logging often disturb their habitats.
- Through the case study of black-backed woodpeckers, the tool aims to illustrate how wildlife conservation and pyrodiversity (the variation in which fires burn landscapes) should be incorporated into fire management efforts around the world.

Climate change is no joke for Australians, says award-winning comedian Dan Ilic
- Despite citizens voting out the Scott Morrison-led government of Australia in 2022, Dan Ilic says there’s still a lot of talk around climate change policy with not enough action to meet national climate targets.
- Known widely for his epic billboards appearing in New York’s Times Square during the COP26 climate summit satirizing Australia’s lack of seriousness at the conference, Ilic is host of the award-winning Australian comedy/climate-focused podcast “A Rational Fear” and spoke with the Mongabay Newscast in Sydney about the landscape surrounding climate policy in the country today.
- He also shares his thoughts on victories for Indigenous communities in the Tiwi Islands and the Galilee Basin, both in Australia, where massive fossil fuel proposals were recently blocked.

Fires threaten Afromontane forests’ ‘whole new world’: Q&A with Martim Melo
- A group of international and local scientists has warned of the threat to a key piece of one of Africa’s most threatened habitats: the Afromontane forests that occur in the highlands of western Angola.
- The scientists recently discovered up to 10 new species living in the patches of evergreen forest in the Namba Mountains.
- But pressure from growing human settlements nearby, mainly uncontrolled fires in the grasslands that surround the forests, threatens to overwhelm this unique ecosystem.
- Scientists are calling for the government and international agencies to establish a protected area to preserve this biodiverse hotspot.

Counterintuitive conservation: Fire boosts aquatic crustaceans in U.S. savannas
- In an interesting twist, two kinds of rare American freshwater crustaceans have been found to thrive after prescribed burns in their habitats.
- Populations of vernal pool fairy shrimp in Oregon and several species of threatened crayfish on the Gulf Coast increased after the removal of invasive plants, woody shrubs and trees from their habitats using fire or mechanical means.
- Fairy shrimp populations were shown to increase more than fivefold following habitat treatments that featured fire, while speckled burrowing crayfish also responded positively following fires set to favor nesting of sandhill cranes (whose own population has soared since).
- Both areas are savanna ecosystems that have relied on frequent fires over millennia — whether naturally occurring or intentionally set by Indigenous peoples — to maintain the open habitats to which myriad organisms have adapted.

Indigenous Amazon forests absorb noxious fumes and prevent diseases from wildfires, study suggests
- A new decade-long study estimates forests in Indigenous lands in the Brazilian Amazon can potentially prevent about 15 million cases of respiratory and cardiovascular infections each year by absorbing thousands of tons of dangerous pollutants emitted by forest fires.
- Forest fires are mainly caused by deforestation to clear the land, releasing noxious fumes which contain carbonaceous aerosol, the main component of fine particulate matter which enters the bloodstream and can cause heart disease and lung cancer.
- Health impacts from forest fires are not only restricted to nearby populations. Intense smoke can travel hundreds of kilometers away from the point of origin.
- The researchers say the study’s findings demonstrate the need for Brazil’s government to resume Indigenous territories’ demarcations and public policies.

Ancient fires may be helping the Amazon survive droughts – modern ones, not so much
- Areas of the Amazon forest with higher concentration of soil pyrogenic carbon, a material produced by the burning of vegetation centuries or millennia ago, show an enhanced resistance to droughts, a new study says.
- Regions richer in pyrogenic carbon appear to have higher soil fertility and water-holding capacity, helping the forest to get through dry periods without enduring the usual damage.
- While the underlying mechanisms aren’t yet understood, the authors hypothesize that species substitution after ancient fires, which brings in trees with lower wood density, might play a role.
- Modern fires, which have become more intense and frequent in recent decades, are unlikely to produce similar effects.

As dry season looms, Sumatra villagers hope their peat restoration pays off
- Community-led efforts to restore degraded peatlands in Indonesia’s Riau province could be put to the test in early 2023 as the dry season sets in.
- Riau is the perennial epicenter of the burning season on Sumatra Island, and is expected to have a more intense dry season after three consecutive years of wetter-than-usual conditions due to La Niña.
- A broad coalition of local governments, communities, researchers and NGOs have been working to restore peatlands that had been drained in preparation for planting, with the hope that restoring water levels will prevent burning.
- As part of the restoration programs, communities are also adapting their farming practices, learning to prepare the land without the use of fire, and picking crops that are suited for the wetter soil conditions.

Brazil’s Pantanal is at risk of collapse, scientists say
- Though the Pantanal is 93% privately owned, this vast Brazilian tropical wetland remains a stronghold for jaguars and untold other species, and connects animals with the Amazon, Cerrado and other biomes.
- A confluence of human activities in Brazil and worldwide — including deforestation and climate change — are heating and drying this watery landscape, threatening the entire ecosystem with drought, wildfires and habitat loss.
- Now, a plan to dredge and straighten the Paraguay River that feeds the Pantanal could serve as the death knell for this vast wetland ecosystem.
- There’s hope that president-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who campaigned on an environmental platform, will initiate stewardship that stops Pantanal deforestation and the waterway project, helping curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Wildfires are climbing up the snowiest mountains of the western U.S.
- Forest fires are getting larger and hotter in the western U.S., shrinking the mountain snowpacks vital to communities and ecosystems.
- When a wildfire burns on mountain slopes, snow that falls later in the winter is more exposed to sun and wind, making it melt or evaporate faster and earlier than ever before.
- Burned land is recovering more slowly as the region warms, leaving less water for trees and plants to regrow and increasing the risks of erosion and flooding.

Tribe and partners light up a forest to restore landscape in California
- The Karuk Tribe partnered with the U.S. Forest Service and other stakeholders to reintroduce traditional burning to help restore forests in the Klamath Mountains.
- The four-year-old project aims to prevent wildfires and make overgrown forests in Northern California look more like they did thousands of years ago when the Tribe stewarded them.
- So far, the project’s successes have been encouraging, however, the Tribe and Forest Service have encountered hurdles in their relationship and have had difficulty agreeing on different fire techniques.
- The project hopes to make burning a seasonal and sustainable part of ecosystem management.

Beef is still coming from protected areas in the Amazon, study shows
- According to a new study, 1.1 million cattle were bought directly from protected areas and another 2.2 million spent at least a portion of their lives grazing in protected areas and Indigenous territories.
- Researchers compiled public records on cattle transit, property boundaries and protected area boundaries between 2013 and 2018. The study period ended in 2018 because, “at the start of 2019, this critical information became less available,” the lead author said.
- Under Brazil’s current President Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected at the start of 2019, the country has seen policies weakening various environmental protections and monitoring agencies, and deforestation has reached its highest levels in 15 years.
- Around 70% of deforestation in the Amazon has been linked to cattle ranching. Meat producers have made commitments to stop sourcing from illegally deforested lands, but a lack of information about where cattle are grazing has allowed many companies to escape accountability.

Fires in the world’s largest wetland turns Brazilian farmers into firefighters
- Fires in 2020 ravaged an area larger than Belgium in the Brazilian Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland, killing at least 17 million animals and leaving locals without water.
- Several initiatives by local nonprofits are taking on the challenge of protecting this unique region by educating residents about fire hazards and training Pantanal cattle ranchers as volunteer firefighters.
- Most of the 2020 fires in the Pantanal started on private farms, according to a study, underscoring the importance of training farmers to suppress flames before they surge into wildfires.
- Experts say fire alerts in the Pantanal are down by 91% so far this year compared to the same period in 2020, thanks to increased efforts by the state government and volunteer programs, as well as wetter weather.

Blazing start to Amazon’s ‘fire season’ as burning hits August record
- Fires in the Brazilian Amazon surged in August to the highest for the month since 2010, surpassing the blazes in August 2019 that drew global attention.
- On Aug. 22 alone, more than 3,300 fire alerts were reported in 24 hours, the worst single-day tally in the Amazon in 15 years.
- Researchers say it’s still too early to tell how severe this fire season will be, but what happened in August is an early warning.

Forest fires are getting worse, 20 years of data confirm
- Fires are now causing an additional 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres) of tree cover loss per year than they did in 2001, according to a newly released Global Forest Watch analysis that examined fires that burn all or most of a forest’s living overstory trees.
- The majority of all fire-caused tree cover loss in the past 20 years (nearly 70%) occurred in boreal regions. Although fires are naturally occurring there, they are now increasing at an annual rate of 3% and burning with greater frequency and severity and over larger areas than historically recorded.
- Fires are not naturally occurring in tropical rainforests, but in recent years, as deforestation and climate change have degraded and dried out intact forests, fires have been escaping into standing tropical rainforests. GFW findings suggest fires in the tropics have increased by roughly 5% per year since 2001.
- Researchers say there is no “silver bullet” solution for forest fires, but experts call for more spending on planning and preparation.

In a hotter, drier climate, how serious is fire risk to island seabirds?
- A new study suggests that fires on remote islands in southwest Australia pose a rising threat to short-tailed shearwaters and other seabirds as climate change creates hotter and drier conditions.
- In 2021, a research team led by Jennifer Lavers surveyed an island in Western Australia’s Recherche Archipelago a year after a fire event, and found little evidence that short-tailed shearwaters had successfully bred after the fire, ignited by a lightning strike, had swept over most of the island.
- Lavers and her research team suggest that Indigenous-led methods of controlled burning could help reduce the risk of catastrophic fires that would endanger seabirds.
- However, a seabird and island expert not connected with the study disagrees that fire currently poses a major threat, since seabirds have been known to rebound from fires, even after the loss of their fledglings and burrows.

Hundreds of iconic Barbary macaques feared dead in Morocco forest fire
- A wildfire has burned through half of the Bouhachem Forest Reserve in northern Morocco, one of the few remaining refuges of the Barbary macaque.
- The fire forced the evacuation of more than 900 families from 15 villages in this region of the Rif mountains, destroying homes and crops and killing livestock.
- In recent months, exceptionally hot, dry conditions have prevailed in Morocco and around the Mediterranean and Western Europe, with observers saying climate change is exacerbating the conditions that produce forest fires in the region.
- The largest trees in the Bouhachem reserve have largely survived, but the burning of the forest understory will have a massive impact on the availability of grazing for villagers’ livestock, as well as food for macaques and other species.

In Indonesia’s forest fire capital, the dry season brings yet more burning
- The onset of the dry season in Indonesia’s Riau province has seen flare up and multiply, some of them believed to have been set deliberately.
- More than 1,000 hectares (2,500 acres) of land has burned so far this year, a sharp increase from the 169 hectares (417 acres) in the first three months of 2022.
- The number of fires has prompted the provincial government to declare an emergency status and call for urgent measures, including cloud seeding to induce rainfall.
- Police have arrested nine people for suspected arson; although the practice is banned by law, farmers and plantation operators often use fire as a cheap tool to clear their concessions of vegetation ahead of planting.

As the Amazon burns, only the weather can ward off a catastrophe, experts say
- The Brazilian Amazon saw the highest number of fires for the month of June in 15 years, with 2,562 major fires detected, an increase of 11.14% over 2021.
- The first half of the year had 7,533 major fires, the most since 2019, according to data from the national space research institute.
- On June 23, the Brazilian government issued a decree banning the use of fires to manage forests throughout the country for the next 120 days.
- Experts say they’re skeptical about this ban, noting that similar measures failed to stop the burning in previous years, and say the weather is the only thing that can help curb the increase in fires as the dry season unfolds.

Tree plantations in Patagonia are the site of wildfires and land dispute
- For decades, Argentina has subsidized the clearing of native forest and planting exotic species, primarily pines, on land often claimed by Indigenous peoples.
- A recent standoff over a land dispute led to gunmen shooting two young Indigenous Mapuche activists, one fatally.
- Pine plantations increase wildfire risk, contributing to several major fires in recent years.
- Wildfires also encourage invasion by pines into native forests, leading to a feedback loop that threatens both native forests and human settlements.

As dry season starts in Indonesia, risk of fires — and haze — looms
- There’s a degree of risk that Southeast Asia may see the return of transboundary haze this year from forest fires in Indonesia, according to a new report by a Singaporean think tank.
- The key driver of that risk is the currently high price of palm oil on the world market, which could pose an incentive for farmers in Indonesia, the world’s top producer of palm oil, to expand their plantations, including by clearing land with fire.
- In anticipation of the dry season, which starts in July, some local governments in Indonesia are putting in place policies to prevent fires, including sanctions for companies using fire to clear their concessions.

Sumatra palm plantations the usual suspects as unusual burning razes peatlands
- Fires have swept through large swaths of peatland forest in the western part of Indonesia’s Sumatra Island since the start of the year, an area that usually sees much smaller, controlled fires.
- Environmental activists say they suspect the fires might be linked to palm oil companies with plantations in and around the burned areas.
- They warn the burning could get worse in the coming months, with the dry season in this part of Sumatra expected to peak only in August.

Repeated fires are silencing the Amazon, says new acoustic monitoring study
- Researchers recorded thousands of hours of sounds in areas that had been logged, burned once and burned multiple times along the “arc of deforestation” in the Brazilian Amazon.
- In the forests with repeated fires, animal communication networks were quieter, with less diversity of sound than in logged forests or forests burned only once. This type of acoustic monitoring can be used as a cost-effective way to check the pulse of the forest.
- The authors were surprised to find that insects, not birds, were the most obvious signal of forest degradation. Additionally, they found that amount of biomass in a forest doesn’t correlate with the level of biodiversity.
- There’s a major difference in the biodiversity of a forest after one burn versus multiple burns, one author said, so protecting forests from repeated fires is still worthwhile.

2021 tropical forest loss figures put zero-deforestation goal by 2030 out of reach
- The world lost a Cuba-sized area of tropical forest in 2021, putting it far off track from meeting the no-deforestation goal by 2030 that governments and companies committed to at last year’s COP26 climate summit.
- Deforestation rates remained persistently high in Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo, home to the world’s two biggest expanses of tropical forest, negating the decline in deforestation seen in places like Indonesia and Gabon.
- The diverging trends in the different countries show that “it’s the domestic politics of forests that often really make a key difference,” says leading forest governance expert Frances Seymour.
- The boreal forests of Eurasia and North America also experienced a spike in deforestation last year, driven mainly by massive fires in Russia, which could set off a feedback loop of more heating and more burning.

Stamping out savanna fires doesn’t bolster carbon sink by much, study finds
- Stamping out fires in the African savanna generates smaller carbon sequestration gains than previously thought, an analysis published in the journal Nature found.
- The data from a decades-long experiment in South Africa’s Kruger National Park raises questions about whether fire suppression in savannas can help in combating climate change, according to an accompanying commentary.
- Shrubs and grasses that make up the savanna store more carbon below ground, on average, than forests, which is one reason why fires aren’t as damaging in these landscapes.
- Even for plots in the national park subject to intense fire activity, the researchers found that root and soil carbon stores are largely preserved.

In destroying the Amazon, big agribusiness is torching its own viability
- A new study has found that the transition zone between the Amazon and Cerrado in the northeast of Brazil has heated up significantly and become drier in the past two decades.
- The research points to deforestation in the Amazon and global climate changes as factors prolonging the dry season and warming up the region, leaving it susceptible to severe droughts and forest fires.
- Ironically, the changes being driven by the intensified agricultural activity are rendering the region less suitable for crop cultivation.
- The authors of the new study say there needs to be a balance of sustainable agricultural solutions and an environmentally focused political agenda to protect the region’s ecosystems, its economy, and its people.

‘Everything is on fire’: Flames rip through Iberá National Park in Argentina
- Fires in the central Corrientes province of northeast Argentina have burned through nearly 60% of Iberá National Park, home to protected marshlands, grasslands and forests that hosts an array of species.
- Many of the fires originated from nearby cattle ranches, and spread across significant portions of the park due to a prolonged drought.
- Conservationists are working to relocate a number of reintroduced species, including giant river otters and macaws, to places of safety.
- While experts say they expect a substantial loss to biodiversity, they add that the park should mount a rapid recovery thanks to all the rewilding work already done.

As Australia faces new fire reality, forest restoration tactics reevaluated
- More than 24 million hectares (59 million acres) burned during Australia’s devastating “Black Summer” bushfire season of 2019-2020, which formed part of a confirmed climate change-driven trend of worsening fire weather and larger, more intense forest fires.
- Scientists are still assessing the extent of the damage and are calling for a greater focus on understanding the effects of fires. Bushfires in Australia have been worsening for more than two decades as escalating drought places pressure on forest resilience and recovery.
- Since 2003, alpine ash (Eucalyptus delegatensis) and mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnens), the world’s tallest flowering plant, have been the focus of Victoria state’s largest post-fire reseeding effort ever. But the Black Summer fires caused foresters to reevaluate the effectiveness and future of this initiative.
- With future wildfires expected to see ferocity equal to the 2019-20 fire season, forest managers are questioning traditional tree restoration approaches, with some even wondering if regrowing forests is viable. Researchers are actively testing more interventionist approaches, such as replanting seeds and seedlings with genetically fire-resilient traits.

Indonesia’s new epicenter of forest fires shifts away from Sumatra and Borneo
- Indonesia, a country that suffers from recurring fires every year, saw an increase in land and forest fires this year, with flames burning an area twice the size of London.
- Two-thirds of the burned area was in the provinces of West Nusa Tenggara and East Nusa Tenggara, which until recently experienced much less burning than the islands of Sumatra and Borneo.
- Experts attribute the increase in fires in the two provinces to the lack of firefighting capacity at the local level and the extreme dry weather.

As the Amazon burns, its Indigenous inhabitants choke on the haze
- Forest fires in the Brazilian Amazon increased this year, with much of the smoke generated concentrating in the state of Acre and disproportionately affecting the health of Indigenous people.
- At the peak of the fires, in July and August, a total of 88,400 hectares (218,400 acres) of land burned, a 20% increase from the 76,400 hectares (188,800 acres) burned in the same period in 2020.
- Recorded cases of respiratory disease increased by almost 8% from June to September 2021 over the previous year, according to data from the Acre state health department.
- Indigenous people, who have lower immunity and a higher incidence of pre-existing medical conditions, are among the most at-risk groups to the smoke pollution, compounded by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Wildlife death toll from 2020 Pantanal fires tops 17 million, study finds
- A new study has found that nearly 17 million animals died in the Pantanal fires in 2020.
- The researchers came to this estimate by conducting distance sampling surveys, walking tracts of the Pantanal shortly after the fires and counting the number of dead vertebrates they encountered.
- However, the researchers say this is likely to be an underestimate since animals may have died underground or may have died later from burn injuries.
- The 2020 fires burned 4.5 million hectares (11 million acres) of the Pantanal, which is about 30% of the entire biome.

As Ethiopia’s war rages, a 400-year-old conservation site is scarred by battle
- A major fire has burned more than 1,000 hectares (nearly 2,500 acres) of grassland in the Guassa Community Conservation Area in Ethiopia’s central highlands.
- The area is among the oldest examples of community-managed conservation in Africa, centered on preserving the Festuca grass that is used for thatching roofs.
- The grasslands are also home to endangered Ethiopian wolves and gelada baboons, and more recently have become a favored ecotourism site.
- It’s still unclear what triggered the blaze, but the area was the site of a battle in Ethiopia’s ongoing civil war in late November.

Indonesian peat restoration has more benefits than it costs, study finds
- The benefits of effective Indonesian peatland restoration — blocking drainage canals to restore water levels and reestablishing vegetation cover — will outweigh the cost of restoration, according to a new study.
- Following the severe fire season of 2015 that destroyed vast swaths of peatland, the administration of President Joko Widodo has targeted restoring 2.5 million hectares (6.2 million acres) of degraded peatland across the archipelago.
- The authors of the new study used satellite data and models to estimate that, if completed, peatland restoration would have contributed significant reductions for 2004-2015 in fire losses and damages, CO2 emissions, PM2.5 particle emissions, health-related losses, and land-cover losses.
- Indonesia has 21 million hectares of peatland that stores an estimated 57 million metric tons of carbon, roughly 55% of the world’s tropical peatland carbon.

‘Thousands of trees’ burned and logged in Cambodia: Q&A with filmmaker Sean Gallagher
- In 2020, filmmaker Sean Gallagher released a short film titled “Cambodia Burning,” which looks at the burning and logging of Cambodia’s forests to make way for agricultural development.
- The Cambodian government has claimed that no large-scale deforestation is happening in the country’s protected areas, but Gallagher says he filmed illegal logging taking place directly inside the confines of Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary.
- Cambodia lost an estimated 2.7 million hectares (6.7 million acres) of forest between 2001 and 2019, accounting for 26.4% of the forest cover that existed in 2000, according to a new report.
- Activists working to protect Cambodia’s remaining forests have faced threats, intimidation and incarceration.

Palm oil firm that dried out its land held not liable for fires that followed
- Indonesia’s highest court has upheld a ruling clearing a palm oil company of responsibility for fires in its concession in Central Kalimantan province.
- Environmental experts say this flies in the face of evidence showing that the firm didn’t have adequate equipment to tackle fires and that the fires started in areas it had recently cleared and drained.
- They warn the verdict sets a worrying precedent for future prosecutions of companies with fires on their concessions, and counters Indonesia’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from land use.

Fire and forest loss ignite concern for Brazilian Amazon’s jaguars
- More than 1,400 jaguars died or were displaced in the Brazilian Amazon due to deforestation and fires over a recent three-year period, according to a recent study.
- The authors recommend “real-time satellite monitoring” of the Brazilian Amazon jaguar population to enable experts to monitor jaguar displacement due to habitat loss and help them to better target conservation efforts on the ground and to prioritize areas for enforcement action.
- Spatial monitoring will also enable identification of wildlife corridors to keep jaguar populations connected to ensure their long-term survival.

Fires bear down on Brazil park that’s home to jaguars, maned wolves
- Thousands of fires caused by humans in Brazil’s Cerrado savanna region continue to spread, with several fires around and inside Chapada dos Veadeiros National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- The park is home to dozens of rare and threatened species as well as the source of many important rivers and waterways; experts warn the intensity of the fires could permanently damage the natural vegetation.
- The fires don’t come as a surprise to many scientists who had predicted earlier this year that ongoing drought, rising rates of deforestation, and lack of enforcement would build up to a severe fire season.
- Every single month this year has seen above-average levels of fire in the Cerrado, with more than 36% of all fires in Brazil this year concentrated in this biome, even though it only covers just over 20% of Brazil’s land mass.

The Pantanal is burning again. Will it be another devastating year?
- Fires have reignited in the Pantanal region of South America, the world’s largest tropical wetland, a year after it lost 30% of its biome to the catastrophic fires of 2020.
- With more than 700,000 hectares (1.7 million acres) of the Pantanal already burned, some experts say this year’s fires could be nearly as devastating as last year’s if the situation is not carefully managed and the current fires are not contained.
- Others are not as concerned, noting that fire is part of the natural ecological process in the Pantanal, and that this year’s fires aren’t nearly as damaging or substantial as last year’s.
- One marked difference between 2020 and 2021 is this year’s increased efforts to fight the fires, with government agencies, NGOs and communities working together to protect the Pantanal.

L.A.-sized tract of primary forest went up in flames in DRC province in 2020
- In 2020, more than 1,500 square kilometers (580 square miles) of old-growth forest burned in Sankuru province, including extensive tracts in a nature reserve.
- Overall, the DRC recorded its second-biggest decline in primary forest cover last year, according to data from Global Forest Watch (GFW), a platform developed by World Resources Institute.
- Forests in the country face increasing pressure from a constellation of factors: a growing population, climatic shifts like shorter rainy seasons, and, more recently, COVID-19-linked turmoil.
- In the past two years alone, more than 1,000 km2 (390 mi2) of land in Sankuru Nature Reserve was set alight.

Loss of forests turns up the heat, literally, on giant anteaters
- A new study shows that giant anteaters, which are relatively poor at regulating their own body temperature, need forest patches as thermal shelters.
- It found that giant anteaters living in less forested habitats tended to travel farther to access forest fragments as a refuge from extreme temperatures.
- Researchers highlight the importance of understanding the spatial requirement of animals to guide management strategies and suggest conservation efforts focused on protecting forest patches within anteaters’ home ranges to help them regulate their body temperature.

Half of burned forests across Latin America don’t survive, study finds
- Researchers monitored the forests of 22 Latin American countries from 2003 to 2018, and analyzed their resistance to fires.
- According to the researchers, 48% of these ecosystems that suffered burning in 2003 were wiped out in subsequent years.
- The study found that all forests in Latin America are susceptible to fires, with severe implications for greenhouse gas emissions, particulate matter, and biodiversity.

Spanish farmers fight forest fires with agroforestry (and many sheep)
- During the summer, Galicia is a dry, fire prone region of northwestern Spain, which is also the continent’s hardest-hit region in terms of wildfires: 2020 saw more acreage burned here than in the previous two years combined.
- A form of agroforestry where livestock are grazed among trees offers a solution, though: sheep and cattle graze the brush that often ignites during dry times, in an agricultural method called silvopasture.
- Not only do the trees provide food and cover for livestock, they also sequester carbon and provide habitat for wildlife while boosting farmers’ incomes.
- Farms that implement silvopasture have not burned during recent fires, as one researcher tells Mongabay: “Adequate management of the mountains with shepherding could be part of the solution to preventing fires.”

Indonesia eyes less severe fire season, but COVID-19 could turn it deadly
- This year’s forest fire season in Indonesia is expected to be less severe than in previous years, but the haze from the burning could still compound the coronavirus crisis in the country.
- Favorable weather conditions and ongoing efforts to restore peatlands point to a “relatively benign” fire season, and hence less risk of severe haze, a new report says.
- Even before the pandemic, haze from forest and peat fires was known to increase cases of respiratory infections fourfold in the hardest-hit areas; combined with COVID-19, haze this time around could stretch the country’s overwhelmed hospitals beyond breaking point.
- Indonesia has recently become the global epicenter of the disease, registering more daily cases than India and Brazil, with the country’s doctors’ association warning the health care system has “functionally collapsed.”

Hotter and drier: Deforestation and wildfires take a toll on the Amazon
- Drought and high temperatures amplify the destructive effects of deforestation and wildfires.
- Across the Amazon Basin, tree species adapted to drier conditions are becoming more prevalent, and in the Central Amazon, savannas have replaced floodplain forests in just a few decades.
- While deforestation remains a main concern, the impacts of forest degradation are becoming increasingly important.

Wildfires turn up the heat on farmers growing Indonesia’s ‘hottest’ pepper
- Farmers in the south of Indonesian Borneo have built up a reputation and a lucrative industry around their Hiyung chili pepper, said to be the hottest in the country.
- The pepper grows well in the swampy peat soil of the region; farmers here began planting it after their rice crops failed in the same acidic soil.
- But the chili peppers, which local officials say have elevated farmers’ income to six times the local average, are under threat from the perennial fires that sweep across Indonesia’s drained peatlands.

Rocky Mountains are burning more now than ever, and it could get worse
- Wildfires in the high elevation Rocky Mountains are burning nearly twice as often as in the past, according to a new study that looks back at 2,000 years of data.
- While fires in the Rockies, like in the U.S. West, are part of the natural cycle, the study authors say the current rate of burning puts us in “uncharted territory.”
- Fires are expected to continue, and increase in frequency, as climate change leads to hotter and drier summers.
- The findings add to growing calls to address the causes of climate change, while simultaneously working to adapt to and mitigate the impacts of wildfires on human communities.

Cattle-driven clearing continues in Brazil’s Triunfo do Xingu protected area
- Triunfo do Xingu Environmental Protection Area lies in the ecologically rich Xingu Basin in the Brazilian Amazon and spans some 1.7 million hectares (4.2 million acres) — an area more than half the size of Belgium.
- Despite its protected status, the area has been heavily deforested, losing 476,000 hectares (1.18 million acres) of humid primary forest between 2006 and 2020, according to satellite data from the University of Maryland (UMD), a 32% decrease in total forest cover.
- 2020 saw the highest amount of forest loss since the creation of the protected area, nearly 70,000 hectares (173,000 acres) — an area nearly the size of New York City; preliminary data show clearing of Triunfo do Xingu’s forests has continued into 2021, with “unusually high” levels of deforestation detected the week of March 15.
- Deforestation in the region is largely driven by cattle ranching, and sources say the invasions of Triunfo do Xingu are aided by its remoteness as well as lax enforcement of environmental regulations.

Peatland on fire again as burning season starts in Indonesia
- Indonesia’s annual fire season has started again, with hotspots detected in 10 provinces.
- Some of the fires have been detected in protected areas with large swaths of peatland.
- The government says it’s preparing to carry out cloud seeding to induce rainfall in affected areas.
- However, environmentalists have called for more traditional methods of law enforcement to prevent fires breaking out in the first place.

‘Devastating’ fires engulf Brazilian Pantanal wetlands – again
- Wildfires erupting in August have ravaged much of Brazil’s Pantanal Matogrossense National Park, which is a part of the Pantanal region, the world’s largest tropical wetland.
- Fires have so far consumed nearly 4.5 million hectares across the Pantanal, totaling about 30% of the biome and nearly 22 times the area lost between 2000 and 2018.
- This year’s intense fires added to damage already done in 2019, when flames engulfed hundreds of thousands of hectares across the Pantanal.
- Sources say most of the fires started from slash-and-burn farming, which is becoming more prevalent due to the weakening of environmental agencies under the Bolsonaro administration.

A Madagascar forest long protected by its remoteness is now threatened by it
- Satellite data show an increase in deforestation in Tsaratanana Reserve and the neighboring COMATSA protected area in northern Madagascar in recent years, and an uptick in the last few months.
- Though many of the island’s forests have been extensively cleared, these northern forests were relatively well protected until recently.
- The loss of these forests to make way for the illegal cultivation of marijuana, vanilla and rice threatens the region’s rich biodiversity and high endemism, conservationists say.
- Some experts argue that the legalization of marijuana would make it less likely that people would grow the crop in the remote forests of Tsaratanana.

As minister and activists trade barbs, Madagascar’s forests burn
- Forest fires are blazing across Madagascar, including in its protected areas, home to some of the world’s rarest species, from critically endangered lemurs to hundreds of endemic snails.
- In Manombo Special Reserve, known for sheltering more than 50 species of snails found nowhere else on Earth, woodland the size of 800 Olympic swimming pools went up in smoke last month.
- In nearby Befotaka-Midongy National Park, one of the largest stretches of evergreen forest in Madagascar, more than 1,000 fires were reported this year.
- A heated debate has erupted online about the fires, with some activists criticizing the environment ministry, while the ministry says the blame is shared by NGOs that manage most of the country’s protected areas.

Money to burn: Study finds fire-prevention incentives in Indonesia don’t work
- Villages in Indonesian Borneo that were offered financial incentives to not burn their land for farming were just as likely to continue setting fires as villages that received no financial assistance.
- That’s the finding in a new study that concludes that without an alternative land-clearing method that’s as cost-effective as burning, rural communities will continue to set fire to forests to make way for agricultural land.
- The researchers suggested several factors might explain the findings, including the size of the incentive, individual villagers’ wariness that the money would trickle down to them, and the perception that burning is still the cheapest way to add value to the land.
- The researchers also say there’s a poor understanding of the fire problem among policymakers in Indonesia, who tend to overlook the economic drivers of the practice and think that tougher penalties and bans will suffice to end it.

Alleged gov’t-linked land grabs threaten Cambodia’s Cardamom Mountains
- The Cardamom Mountains sit off the Gulf of Thailand in southern Cambodia and provide important habitat for a multitude of plant and animal species, many of them already threatened with extinction.
- Due to Cardamoms’ remoteness, they had largely been spared the human encroachment that has razed much of the rainforest across the country – until infrastructure development in 2020 opened up the area to loggers, poachers, and others seeking to exploit the region’s forests.
- Satellite data show deforestation is continuing to surge in the Cardamoms despite most of the range being formally demarcated as protected land.
- Sources familiar with the issues say the Hun Sen government is encouraging land-grabbing in protected areas in a bid to build public support ahead of the 2022 election season, and that Cambodia’s systemic corruption is enabling timber and plantation companies to move in and clear forest.

As fire season ends, Brazil cited for failed Amazon and Pantanal policies
- The Brazilian Amazon saw devastating fires from August to October 2020, while the Pantanal suffered losses of 28% of the entire wetland biome. Critics contend that Jair Bolsonaro’s Amazon Council and the Brazilian armed forces, sent to the Amazon to combat deforestation and this year’s fires, failed to perform either task effectively.
- Meanwhile, Brazilian President Bolsonaro has made more major cuts to IBAMA and ICMBio, the nation’s two funding-strapped principal environmental agencies, while Environment Minister Ricardo Salles has held back the grand majority of the ministry’s environmental policies budget this year.
- Millions of dollars in funding earmarked for the Army’s Green Brazil Operation 2 this year was reportedly spent not on controlling deforestation or Amazon fires, but on military barracks improvements at bases located well outside the Amazon region. Other Amazon operations were delayed and/or poorly coordinated and executed.
- Critics also argue that IBAMA firefighting resources arrived far too late to the Pantanal, or were poorly focused by the Army in the Amazon. The military, however, claims it gave out large fines for environmental crimes; but environmental fines in Brazil are rarely if ever paid.

Video: Vets hail ‘victory’ as jaguar burned in Pantanal fires returns to wild
- This year, fires in the Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland region, burned through about 4.1 million hectares (10.1 million acres), which constitutes about 28% of the region.
- A 3-year-old jaguar caught in the fires suffered third-degree burns on all four of his paws as he ran across burning peat.
- In September, the jaguar was rescued by a group of veterinarians and delivered to a clinic that helped treat his wounds.
- A month later, rains had extinguished most of the fires, and the jaguar was released in the same spot from which he was rescued.

‘Zero-deforestation’ paper giant APRIL justifies clearing of Sumatran peatland
- A subsidiary of one of the world’s biggest pulp and paper companies is alleged to have cleared carbon-rich and ecologically important peatland in Sumatra that should have been restored.
- The clearing was reported by villagers in July on a concession managed by PT Riau Andalan Pulp & Paper (RAPP), a subsidiary of Asia Pacific Resources International Holdings Limited (APRIL), which has a zero-deforestation policy across the group.
- The area included forest that had been burned in 2016 and that would therefore have qualified for priority restoration under a government program to protect peatlands.
- The government had previously warned RAPP for clearing peatland in 2016 in a different concession, but APRIL says the clearing this time around was legal and approved by the environment ministry.

Brazil reports lower deforestation, higher fires in September
- Brazil’s national space research institute INPE reported a third straight monthly drop in Amazon deforestation in September, but its data also showed a sharp increase in the area affect by fires.
- According to INPE’s deforestation alert system, deforestation in the “legal Amazon” during the month of September amounted to 964 square kilometers, down 34% from September 2019. That follows a 27% decline in July and a 21% decline in August relative to a year ago when deforestation in the region hit the highest level since 2008.
- However the reported decline in recent months does not match the trend reported by Imazon, an independent NGO, which reported increases of more than 30% in July and August, but hasn’t published September analysis yet. The discrepancy could be due to the different methodologies used by the two systems, though normally INPE and Imazon’s data show strong correlation.
- Since January, INPE has reported more than 7,000 square kilometers of deforestation in the Amazon, down 10% from the same period last year, but the second highest on record since 2008.

In a drier Amazon, small farmers and researchers work together to reduce fire damage
- Traditional Amazonian communities have used fire for centuries to open up small farming plots in a rotational system that allows the forest to regenerate and biodiversity to be preserved.
- By contrast, the fires used to clear livestock pasture or to clear away vegetation after forest clearing tend to burn uncontrolled and permanently destroy vast swaths of the rainforest.
- With the climate crisis rendering the forest drier and more flammable, villagers living alongside the Tapajós River, one of the main tributaries of the Amazon, have had increasing difficulty maintaining their traditional fire management practice.
- Traditional safeguards such as creating fire breaks can help, but a project in the Brazilian state of Pará is bringing residents and researchers together to both create a fire warning and prediction system and transition away from the use of fire for farming.

The Amazon savanna? Rainforest teeters on the brink as climate heats up
- A new study has found that 40% of the Amazon is at risk of turning into savanna due to decreases in rainfall.
- The paper’s authors used satellite data, climate simulations and hydrological models to better understand the dynamics of rainfall across the tropics and their impacts on the stability of tropical forest ecosystems.
- The team’s simulations suggest that sustained high greenhouse gas emissions through the end of the century could shrink the minimum size of the Amazon by 66%.

Brazil moves toward transfer of deforestation and fire monitoring to military
- In a recent announcement, Brazilian Vice President Hamilton Mourão defended the creation of a new agency that would have full authority over Amazon deforestation and fire monitoring satellite alerts. For three decades, INPE, Brazil’s civilian space agency, has held that role, making data publicly available.
- The VP claims INPE satellite monitoring is outdated and doesn’t see through clouds. Critics of the government note that the space institute’s Prodes and Deter systems continue to provide excellent data on Amazon fires and deforestation, usable for enforcement, while clouds matter little in the dry season when most fires occur.
- Critics contend that multiple moves by the government to disempower INPE are likely ways of denying transparency, ending INPE’s civil authority, and placing deforestation and fire monitoring satellites under secretive military control.
- So far, an effort to fund new military satellites has failed. Meanwhile, Norway has partnered with the companies Planet and Airbus to offer free satellite images for monitoring tropical forests including the Amazon. Such publicly available images from Planet, NASA and other sources could thwart Bolsonaro’s possible attempt at secrecy.

As the Amazon burns, what happens to its biodiversity?
- More than 40% of fires in the Brazilian Amazon this year are burning in standing forests, with more than 4.6 million acres already impacted this year. While far from fully studied, such forest fires have major repercussions for flora and fauna.
- A study found, for example, that the abundance and types of dung beetle species alters in burned Amazon forests. Dung beetles play vital roles in nutrient cycling and seed dispersal. Other research detected declines in butterflies, specialist forest ant species and other litter-dwelling invertebrates, some birds, small mammals and snakes in newly burnt areas.
- Rainforest trees are especially vulnerable because fire is relatively new to the Amazon, and trees there have not developed fire resistance. A rainforest fire, burning through the forest for the first time, kills most small trees and seedlings and can kill 50% of large trees.
- Multiple fires over time continue reducing biodiversity. Some scientists fear that a combination of fires, increasing drought due to climate change, and deforestation could lead to a tipping point — with devastating impacts for the Amazon, which harbors 10% of the world’s biodiversity.

Fires turn sage brush habitat in Washington into a scorched ‘oblivion’
- Wildfires in Washington state have burned hundreds of thousands of acres, including an important mating habitat for sage grouse.
- More than half of the fewer than 1,000 birds in the state may have been lost in the fires, according to leading grouse expert Michael Schroeder.
- Prospects for the species’ recovery here look grim, given that what little habitat they had was surrounded by fields and towns, leaving them no room for refuge.

‘Off the chart’: CO2 from California fires dwarf state’s fossil fuel emissions
- This year’s fires in California have already burned through 1.4 million hectares (3.4 million acres) of land, and the fire season isn’t set to end for at least a couple of months.
- As of Sept. 15, the fires had generated more than 91 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, which is about 25% of the state’s annual emissions from fossil fuels.
- Higher carbon emissions contribute to a multipart climate feedback, accelerating climate change which then sets the stage for more fires that will emit an increasing amount of carbon dioxide, experts say.

Game changer: NASA data tool could revolutionize Amazon fire analysis
- The Amazon has already seen more forest fires this year than in all of 2019, according to satellite data made available in August 2020 by a new NASA fire analysis tool.
- While there are several good fire monitoring satellite systems currently at work above the Amazon, NASA’s new automated system provides near real time monitoring which could allow firefighting teams on the ground to pinpoint fires in remote areas and to take action to put fires out before they spread.
- The new system also differentiates between fires in newly deforested areas, understory forest fires, grassland fires and those set by smallholders to annually clear fields. This differentiation allows authorities to zero in on large scale criminal arson committed by land grabbers, while also preventing the criminalization of subsistence farmers.
- New information provided by the innovative NASA monitoring tool can count fire carbon emissions and the location and size of burnt areas, all of which could further research on global climate change, mitigation, and biodiversity impacts.

The view from above: How do we know what’s really burning in the Amazon?
- As of September 10, 2020 more than a thousand major blazes had occurred in the Amazon this year — making it one of the worst fire years ever.
- The COVID-19 pandemic means there are fewer observers, including media organizations, on the ground this year to report fires to the world, leaving the bulk of the job to satellite fire detection systems.
- This Mongabay exclusive story offers an overview of some of the top organizations doing satellite fire monitoring in Amazonia, as well as explaining the types of detection systems getting the job done — read on and you’ll learn the vital differences between “aerosol emissions” and “hot spot detection,” and much more.
- But no matter how good these observational systems become — even as they inform the world of what’s happening in the Amazon — monitoring won’t be fully useful until the Brazilian government takes effective action and uses revolutionary “near real time” fire data to protect the greatest extant rainforest on Earth.

Around the world, a fire crisis flares up, fueled by human actions
- An increase in fire alerts this year compared to last year could have dire consequences for health, biodiversity and the economy, according to a newly released report by WWF and Boston Consulting Group.
- Though some wildfires are triggered naturally, humans are responsible for an estimated 75% of all wildfires.
- In the Northern Hemisphere, this is attributed to negligence, while in the tropics, fires are often set intentionally to clear land for agriculture.
- The report suggests several urgent actions to address fires, including investing in fire prevention, halting deforestation, raising national goals for emission reductions, bringing fire back to fire-dependent landscapes, clarifying governance and coordinating policies, bringing the private sector on board, and relying on science.

Survival of Indigenous communities at risk as Amazon fire season advances
- The number of major Amazon fires this year has more than doubled since August 13, with most of those fires being illegal. 674 major fires were detected between May 28 and September 2, with a sharp increase inside Indigenous territories in the last two weeks, raising concerns among Indigenous leaders.
- Indigenous groups are being left to fight the fires on their own, without support from government institutions. IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency has been largely stripped of funds and lacks adequate equipment to fight the blazes, while the Army, sent to the Amazon in May, is reportedly failing to suppress most fires.
- Combined with COVID-19, smoke from fires poses a serious threat to Indigenous health. Native peoples have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, and have weaker immune systems for respiratory disease. A recent study shows that Indigenous hospitalizations for respiratory disease coincide with deforestation rates year-by-year.
- Isolated Indigenous groups are especially under threat as fires put their food sources at risk. Experts say that isolated and uncontacted groups, to fend off hunger, are sighted more often roaming during Amazon fires, potentially risking exposure to Western diseases.

Friday night follies: Brazil cuts deforestation funding, then restores it
- More than 500 major fires were reported in the Amazon as of last week, most of them illegal. Which is why it seemed a strange moment for Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro administration to announce it was defunding all deforestation and firefighting efforts by government agencies in the Amazon forest and Pantanal wetlands biomes.
- The cuts, totaling R $60 million (US $11.1 million), would have come from the budgets of IBAMA, the nation’s environmental agency, and ICMBio, its national parks agency. Within hours of the funding reduction announcement, the government reversed itself and restored the money taken away.
- Since then experts have argued theories as to the reason for the government’s erratic actions. Some say it is a means of making a show of the anti-environmental policy the administration would truly like to put forward, but cannot for fear of international censure. Others see it as political maneuvering with the Bolsonaro administration.
- Analysts point out that the budget cuts made no fiscal sense, since IBAMA’s most expensive contracts for helicopter and vehicle rentals to curb deforestation and do firefighting are paid up through April 2021 by the Amazon Fund, money mostly provided by Norway and Germany, with more than R $60 million available.

Paper giant APP linked to Indonesia peat clearing despite sustainability vow
- Greenpeace Southeast Asia has identified nearly 3,500 hectares (8,650 acres) of peatland clearing in pulpwood plantations in Sumatra supplying Asian Pulp & Paper.
- Analysis of satellite imagery showed the clearing began in August 2018 and continued through June this year, despite APP having a “no peatland” and “no burning” policy that it also imposes on its suppliers.
- Greenpeace and local NGO Jikalahari also found evidence of fires in the concessions in question, which appeared to have been set deliberately to clear the land for planting.
- APP has denied clearing the peatland or setting the fires, calling into question the accuracy of the maps used and saying the fires spread from neighboring farms.

Bleak milestone: 500 major fires detected in Brazilian Amazon this year
- 516 major fires, most of them illegal, covering 376,416 hectares (912,863 acres) were detected between May 28 and August 25, 2020, with the Amazon fire season not even half over, and expected to run at least through September.
- Of those fires, 12% were within intact forests, while the rest were in recently deforested areas where the cut trees were allowed to dry out before being lit on fire to convert the former rainforest to cattle pasture and croplands.
- Most of these fires were illegal, being in direct defiance of a total Amazon fire ban issued by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on July 15, 2020.
- IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency, which annually fought Amazon fires in the past, has a greatly diminished role this year, having largely been defunded by the Bolsonaro administration. Fire suppression this year falls to the Brazilian Army, which has little experience controlling Amazon blazes.

Scientists urge reassessment of threatened species after Australian bushfires
- A new paper suggests that the 2019-2020 Australian bushfires impacted critical habitats of more than 800 native species, with 70 species losing more than 30% of their natural range.
- The bushfires may have led to a 14% increase in threatened species, according to the study.
- The researchers recommend an urgent assessment of threatened species via the Australian government’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act, which classifies threatened species and provides legal protection for them.
- Other actions may be needed to help preserve native wildlife populations, such as invasive species management, captive-breeding programs, and the protection of fire-burned regions to aid recovery, the researchers suggest.

More than 260 major, mostly illegal Amazon fires detected since late May
- The Amazon fire season is building momentum, with 227 fires covering nearly 128,000 hectares, reported between May 28 and August 10. By today, that number rose to 266 fires.
- More than 220 of the May 28 to June 10 fires occurred in Brazil, with just six in Bolivia, and one in Peru. 95% of the Brazilian fires were illegal and in violation of the nation’s 120-day ban on fires. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has called the 2020 reports of deforestation and fires a “lie.”
- Most Amazon blazes are set, with land grabbers, ranchers and farmers using fire as a deforestation tool, and as a means of converting rainforest to pasture and croplands.
- Fourteen of the Brazilian fires were within protected areas. The most heavily impacted of these were Jamanxim and Altamira national forests in Pará state — areas long notorious for criminal land grabbing.

Fires in Argentina’s Paraná Delta are burning ‘out of control’
- Hundreds of fires are currently burning through the Paraná Delta region, an important wetland ecosystem that hosts a range of wildlife in Argentina, raising concerns among conservationists.
- The Paraná River is also experiencing extremely low water levels due to a regional drought, although experts say an exact climatic reason for the drought has yet to be determined.
- Experts say most of the fires have been deliberately lit by people, but they are now raging “out of control” due to drought, lack of rainfall and low river levels.

In California, forest fires spark a babel of birdsong, study shows
- In California, a group of researchers mapped the sounds of the hermit warbler (Setophaga occidentalis) and analyzed the impacts caused by forest fire on the birds’ songs.
- The researchers found that the diversity of sounds increased in areas that had been affected by forest fires. Three factors impacted the songs: the fires; the massive effect of bird dispersion, which makes room for individuals from other groups to insert their “dialects”; and the time interval due to migration.
- “The result was that some areas have birds singing in more than one dialect, resulting in a complex diversity of sounds in California,” says the study’s lead author.

Photos show scale of massive fires tearing through Siberian forests
- A series of newly released images from Greenpeace International show megafires burning through the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia, Russia.
- It’s estimated that fires have burnt more than 20.9 million hectares of land in Russia, and 10.9 million hectares of forest, since the start of 2020.
- The fires are being helped by unusually warm temperatures, including a reading of more than 38° Celsius (100° Fahrenheit) in the town of Verkhoyansk — the hottest on record inside the Arctic Circle.
- There are concerns that the smoke from the Siberian fires will cause respiratory problems for people living in urban areas, especially in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Scientists measure Amazon drought and deforestation feedback loop: Study
- Researchers have warned about the Amazon rainforest-to-savanna tipping point for years, but a clearer picture of how this may happen is emerging with new research.
- A recent study covering the years 2003-2014 in the Amazon basin found that the deforestation-drought feedback loop accounts for 4% of the region’s drought, and 0.13% of deforestation per millimeter of rainfall lost (for example, a rainfall decrease of 200 millimeters would then trigger an additional 26% increase in deforestation).
- Experts not connected with the study say that the actual percentages could be higher, because Brazilian politics have shifted since 2003-14, leading to major deforestation, while climate change impacts have intensified. The authors agree their results may be underestimated, but say the figures are useful in setting a baseline for climate models.
- Deforestation and drying in the Amazon could cause the rainforest to spiral into becoming a degraded, dry savanna if nothing is done to deactivate the feedback loop. However, it is difficult to say how soon that tipping point will be reached.

In Madagascar’s dry forests, COVID-19 sparks an intense, early fire season
- Though Madagascar officially has just under 1,800 reported infections and 16 deaths from COVID-19, the pandemic’s socioeconomic effects will be catastrophic for the country, the U.N. has warned.
- One tangible impact has been the fire season, which has started early and is likely to be fiercer this year as rural residents deprived of tourism revenue, employment opportunities and access to food markets turn to the forest to survive.
- The environment ministry registered 52,000 forest fire incidents from January until the start of June, with the western flank of the country, which hosts its unique dry forests, being the worst-affected.
- A reduction in NGOs’ and state agencies’ field activities has made forest patrols more challenging and affected the critical task of creating fire breaks.

The fire prophet: Dolors Armenteras on saving the Amazon and fighting misogyny in science
- She helped create the first geographic information system for the Humboldt Institute, one of the most important environmental research centers in the country.
- She was also one of the first scientists to predict that, after the 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas, deforestation would increase rather than decrease in the country.
- She founded a research group in landscape ecology at the National University of Colombia, made up mainly of women who are inspired to overcome the obstacles imposed by the cultural of machismo that still prevails in academia.

Palm oil from Indonesian grower that burned forest is still being sold
- An investigation by the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) shows that palm oil from PT Kallista Alam, a company in Sumatra, entered the global supply chain and may have ended up in products made by Nestlé and Mars.
- The company was largely blackballed by buyers with sustainability commitments after a 2012 fire on its concession razed 1,000 hectares (2,500 acres) of pristine lowland rainforest that’s home to critically endangered Sumatran orangutans.
- An “oversight” in the second half of 2019 led to its crude palm oil being bought by a refinery run by the Permata Hijau Group, a top Indonesian palm oil processor that supplies commodities giant Cargill.
- Cargill, in turn, sells palm oil to multinational brands including Nestlé and Mars; RAN has called on the latter two companies to explicitly issue a no-buy order to their suppliers for Kallista Alam’s palm oil.

Indonesia struggles to restore peatlands as fires strangle national parks
- More than a million hectares across Indonesia burned in 2019, according to the government’s numbers. The fires released an estimated 708 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) in the atmosphere, costing the country more than $5 billion in economic losses that year, according to the World Bank.
- Sumatra was particularly affected, with fires consuming large swaths of primary forest in protected areas like Berbak-Sembilang National Park, which is home to endangered wildlife like Sumatran tigers and elephants, and false gharials.
- Illegal logging and the expansion of plantations in the region area over the past decades has rapidly transformed the park and the surrounding area, draining peat swamps and turning them into degraded, easily flammable patches of land. Following Indonesia’s peatland destruction-fueled fire crisis of 2015 President Joko Widodo established the Peatland Restoration Agency (BRG) in Jakarta in 2016. The agency planned to restore over 2.6 million hectares of degraded peatlands, including those in concession areas and in protected areas like Berbak-Sembilang.
- However, BRG president Nazir Foed acknowledged that restoration “progress has not been optimal.” Critics say the effort has been stymied by a lack of collaboration between stakeholders and a lack of consensus on what even constitutes a restored peatland.

Marijuana cultivation whittling away Madagascar’s largest connected forest
- Northern Madagascar contains the largest block of connected forest left in the country.
- Tsaratanana Reserve is supposed to protect a large portion of this forest. However, satellite data and imagery show Tsaratanana is being cleared at a rapid rate.
- Local officials say slash-and-burn agriculture for marijuana cultivation is to blame. The Madagascar National Parks agency helped organize military deployments to the Tsaratanana area in 2014 and 2017, and is planning another intervention this year.
- Scientists say that if this deforestation continues, it will fragment the reserve’s well-connected forests and threaten the animals that live there — many of which are found nowhere else in the world.

Taylor and Tate: Canine-human teams rescue Australia’s fire-ravaged koalas
- Specially-trained koala detection dogs joined rescue teams during and after the catastrophic Australian bushfires to help find the injured marsupials quickly and increase their chance of survival.
- Koalas had a hard time escaping the fires. Because they are slow moving and their first instinct is to climb into the canopy, curl into a ball, and wait, they were often killed or injured by the incredibly intense bushfires.
- Koalas numbers had already dropped significantly in New South Wales due to habitat loss, climate change, drought and disease. The fires exacerbated what was already a precarious situation.
- Eventually, surviving koalas will be released back into the wild, but it will take great care due to their specialized diets, need for social cohorts, and time required to recover from their burns.

Kafka in the Amazon: Volunteer forest fire fighter charged with arson still in limbo
- Alter do Châo, a small resort town within Santarém municipality in Pará state, welcomed some 200,000 tourists last year, causing real estate prices to soar, and putting increasing pressure on the Amazon resort’s surrounding forests.
- Following the 2019 Amazon wildfire season, Brazilian police arrested four volunteer firefighters, accusing them of arson in the Alter do Châo Reserve. The firefighters allegedly set the fires to receive money from international environmental groups, according to the authorities. But no evidence has been presented as yet.
- The investigation has dragged on for months, with one suspect still under house arrest. However, many locals believe land speculators and/or land thieves are far more likely to be responsible for last year’s blazes.
- The fear expressed by many in Alter do Châo, is that lawlessness is becoming sanctioned in Amazonia due to the failure of the Bolsonaro government to prosecute socio-environmental crimes. Meanwhile, the volunteer fire brigade members continue awaiting the slow turning of Brazil’s wheels of justice.

Tech made to find galaxies sets its sights on wildfires
- Satellite technology used to hunt the night skies for exploding supernovae will be turning inwards to search for wildfires on earth.
- A geosynchronous satellite can compare large areas of land with previous images to detect minuscule changes in light that might signal a new fire, moments after its ignition.
- The full project utilizes multiple layers of technology to improve early detection, response, and monitoring of wildfires. Cameras, drones, air tankers, low earth orbit satellites, and geosynchronous satellites make up the entire system, called FUEGO.
- A wildfire detection company, Fireball International, is aiming to bring the FUEGO system to Australia as soon as possible to help reduce the chances of another destructive bushfire season.

Siberia experiences hottest spring on record, fueling wildfires
- In April, many parts of Asia, including Siberia, experienced record heat, which led to wildfires in Russia’s northernmost region.
- Experts are concerned about the early start of the fire season in Siberia, especially after the mass devastation caused by the 2019 Siberian wildfires.
- The fires, which are likely fueled by climate change, could release more carbon dioxide into the air, which generates further warming, experts say.
- The more immediate threat is the health risk that the smoke from the fires pose to people, particularly when combined with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Amazon fires may be worse in 2020 as deforestation and land grabbing spikes
- Nearly 800 square kilometers of forest were cut down during the first three months of this year — 51% more than during the same period in 2019. Those who cleared the rainforest will need to burn the downed trees during the upcoming dry season in order to make way for cattle pastures and croplands.
- A third of the devastation occurred on public lands, which are the preferred target for land grabbers. Recent firings at IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency, and a loosening of regulations for wood exports have paved the way for even more illegal public land thefts this year.
- After one of the driest rainy seasons in recent years, the soil in Amazonia is drier and the temperatures higher than normal — perfect conditions for fires to spread easily.
- More fires, should they occur in August and September of this year, could be problematic for the hard-pressed public healthcare system, as airborne soot adds to increased hospitalizations for respiratory complications. This scenario is especially worrisome as Amazonia’s health system is in collapse due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Australia’s logging ‘madness’ fuels more fires, hastens ecosystem collapse
- In the aftermath of the 2019-2020 Australian bushfires, logging has recommenced in the Australian state of Victoria, despite intense criticism from scientists and conservationists.
- The Victorian government announced that logging in native forests will be discontinued by 2030, but conservationists say that 10 more years of logging could lead to ecosystem collapse.
- Scientists argue that logging makes a forest more vulnerable to catching fire, and they’ve drawn a direct correlation between the logging industry and the last bushfire season.
- Plantation logging offers a possible solution to native forest logging, and loggers can also be retrained to be full-time firefighters, experts say.

Audio: What can we expect from tropical fire season 2020?
- On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast we look at what’s driving the intense fire seasons we’ve seen around the world in recent years, what we can expect from the 2020 fire season in tropical forest regions like the Amazon and Indonesia, and some solutions to the problem.
- Australia’s fire season may have just ended, but most of the world’s tropical forest regions will soon be entering their own. We welcome three guests to the podcast today to examine the trends shaping tropical fire seasons around the world: Rhett Butler, Dan Nepstad, and Aida Greenbury.
- Wildfires have made international headlines a lot in the past few years, most recently due to Australia’s devastating bushfires, but the Amazon, Indonesia, and Congo Basin also had severe fire seasons in 2019.
- Our guests discuss the drivers and also some solutions, like investing in Brazilian farmers to incentivize fire prevention, and the High Carbon Stock Approach to stemming forest loss.

Healing the world through ‘radical listening’: Q&A with Dr. Kinari Webb
- Kinari Webb is a medical doctor and founder of Health in Harmony, a nonprofit aimed at curbing global warming by protecting rainforests and empowering the human communities that live within them.
- Over the past 10 years, Health in Harmony has helped lift communities in Indonesian Borneo from poverty by providing sustainable, local livelihoods that have dramatically reduced their reliance on logging.
- Webb says she and her colleagues were able to accomplish this by listening to what communities really needed and to their ideas about possible solutions; she says Health in Harmony’s model could be applied to other communities around the world, even those in developed countries.
- On a larger scale, Webb says governments need to stop prioritizing economic growth; she says the COVID-19 crisis highlights the danger of reliance on global supply chains, and that working together and moving toward a “regenerative economy” would help humanity weather future pandemics — as well as prevent them from happening in the first place.

Forest fires in Indonesia set to add toxic haze to COVID-19 woes
- Forest fires have flared up in Indonesia, marking the start of the dry season and threatening to aggravate respiratory ailments amid the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak.
- Haze from forest fires sickens hundreds of Indonesians annually, mostly on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo; many of them now suffer chronic respiratory problems that puts them at high risk of suffering acutely from COVID-19.
- Studies done in Italy have linked higher levels of air pollution to higher COVID-19 mortality rates, and experts in Indonesia fear that theory will play out in the country that already has the second-highest death rate from the pandemic in Asia.
- Social distancing measures imposed to slow the spread of the coronavirus are already hampering fire prevention programs, and could do the same for firefighting efforts once the dry season intensifies.

Thailand’s captive elephants face starvation amid COVID-19 tourism freeze
- The COVID-19 crisis has brought tourism in Thailand to a halt, forcing at least 85 elephant camps in northern Thailand to close and lay off more than 5,000 staff.
- Captive elephants used in the tourism industry are at high risk of starvation and neglect, animal advocates say.
- Organizations like Save Elephant Foundation and World Animal Protection are working to bring food and other resources to as many needy elephants as possible.
- Sanctuaries are also facing difficult times without revenue from paying volunteers and day guests.

Rapid deforestation of Brazilian Amazon could bring next pandemic: Experts
- Nearly 25,000 COVID-19 cases have been confirmed in Brazil, with 1,378 deaths as of April 15, though some experts say this is an underestimate. Those figures continue growing, even as President Jair Bolsonaro downplays the crisis, calling it “no worse than a mild flu,” and places the economy above public health.
- Scientists warn that the next emergent pandemic could originate in the Brazilian Amazon if Bolsonaro’s policies continue to drive Amazon deforestation rates ever higher. Researchers have long known that new diseases typically arise at the nexus between forest and agribusiness, mining, and other human development.
- One way deforestation leads to new disease emergence is through fire, like the Amazon blazes seen in 2019. In the aftermath of wildfires, altered habitat often offers less food, changing animal behavior, bringing foraging wildlife into contact with neighboring human communities, creating vectors for zoonotic bacteria, viruses and parasites.
- Now, Bolsonaro is pushing to open indigenous lands and conservation units to mining and agribusiness — policies which greatly benefit land grabbers. Escalating deforestation, worsened by climate change, growing drought and fire, heighten the risk of the emergence of new diseases, along with epidemics of existing ones, such as malaria.

Koalas vs climate change: Q&A with John Zichy-Woinarski
- Mongabay spoke to John Zichy-Woinarski, Co-Chair of the IUCN SSC Australian Marsupial and Monotreme specialist group, to examine the marsupial’s current status in the aftermath of the Australian bushfires.
- Woinarski says that probably the single factor that could make the most improvement to koala conservation is tighter control on land clearing.
- “I think it would be prudent now to re-assess the conservation status of the species as a whole under Australian legislation, and this is likely to happen. Without wishing to pre-empt the process, I’d foreshadow that an Australian-wide listing of vulnerable would be the likely outcome from any national re-assessment – this is the status we concluded in our IUCN assessment.”
- Treating koalas as a ‘flagship’ species is tricky though, he says: koala losses help convey the magnitude of biodiversity loss associated with these fires, but less charismatic species have been far more affected by fires and there has been far less funding available for them. Nonetheless, some of the supported actions for koalas may have some collateral benefits for other species.

How to help koalas recover after Australia’s fires? Q&A with Rebecca Montague-Drake
- Mongabay spoke with Rebecca Montague-Drake from the Koala Recovery Partnership to discuss the road to recovery for koalas.
- She explained that Australia needs to address climate change to stop the drivers of impacts such as drought and bushfires as well as at the practical level of trying to mitigate the impacts of fire and drought for koalas, through improved fire management and habitat measures.
- The Koala Recovery Partnership, in association with the Koala Hospital, seek a philanthropic organization to partner with in purchasing high-quality koala habitat across the koala’s range.
- The NSW government’s Saving Our Species Program has identified a number of Areas of Regional Koala Significance (ARKS) that meet these criteria and Koala Recovery Partnership is working with them to deliver koala recovery strategies in line with this concept.

How are koalas doing in the aftermath of the Australian fires? Q&A with Cheyne Flanagan
- Mongabay spoke with Cheyne Flanagan from the Port Macquarie Koala Hospital to discuss the marsupial’s current status in the aftermath of the Australian bushfires.
- Around 50 koalas have been hospitalized in New South Wales due to this season’s fires. It is estimated that thousands of koalas have been killed by bush fires.
- Port Macquarie Koala Hospital’s wild koala breeding program is critical. But unless they have good quality habitat that is well managed and cannot be developed, then breeding koalas go out and struggle with logging operations, removal of trees for human development, housing, mining and agriculture.

Extreme El Niño drought, fires contribute to Amazon insect collapse: Study
- A recent study found that dung beetle species experienced significant diversity and population declines in human-modified tropical Brazilian ecosystems in the aftermath of droughts and fires exacerbated after the 2015-2016 El Niño climate event.
- Forests that burned during the El Niño lost, on average, 64% of their dung beetle species while those affected only by drought showed an average decline of 20%. Dung beetles provide vital ecoservices, processing waste and dispersing seeds and soil nutrients.
- For roughly the past three years, entomologists have been sounding alarms over a possible global collapse of insect abundance. In the tropics, climate change, habitat destruction and pesticide use are having clear impacts on insect abundance and diversity. However, a lack of funds and institutional interest is holding back urgently needed research.

Record-high global tree cover loss driven by agriculture
- The new data reveals record-breaking global tree cover loss for 2016 through 2018.
- In 2018 alone, the area of tree cover loss was larger than the UK.
- Agriculture continues to drive tree cover loss globally and in the tropics while forestry and wildfires drive forest loss in North America.

Painting with fire: Cerrado land managers learn from traditional peoples
- Fire is a disturbance that has occurred naturally in Brazil’s tropical savanna — known as the Cerrado biome — for thousands of years. Indigenous and traditional people living in the Cerrado taught themselves to work successfully with fire, using it as an environment-enhancing land management tool.
- However, modern land managers, influenced by techniques practiced in European and U.S. forests, imposed a non-alteration “zero-fire” conservation policy for decades in the Cerrado.
- That practice allowed the steady buildup of combustible organic material, which frequently led to late dry season wildfires or even mega-fires, ecosystem harm, and conflicts with traditional peoples. But in fact, a new study shows prescribed burns in the Cerrado cause no net loss in species diversity, and even enhance some species.
- Starting in 2014, pilot projects launched by the government on conserved lands in the Cerrado have successfully utilized Integrated Fire Management (IFM), including prescribed burns — approaches learned in part from traditional communities. The result is a decrease in wildfire size, intensity and ecosystem damage.

Fallout: Threatened species in Australia continue to struggle after fires
- A devastating bushfire season in Australia has led to significant forest loss in tropical and subtropical regions of Australia’s east coast.
- One of the areas most affected is the border region straddling the states of New South Wales and Queensland, which includes significant sections of the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Area.
- Early findings from the Queensland State Government’s Department of Environment and Science indicate the habitat of 648 threatened species in Queensland has been damaged to some extent by the fires.
- As ecologists travel back into the regions to determine the extent of the damage, questions are being raised about the status of affected species, and the additional threats posed by feral animals, weed infestation and sediment pollution.

Fire in Australia is a symptom of a degraded ecosystem (commentary)
- Ancient, human-induced climate change in Australia precipitated an ecological catastrophe, turning a rainforest continent into desert.
- A compromised ecosystem where biological decomposition of plant matter is insufficient renders an imbalance between photosynthesis and respiration, leaving fire as the only way to balance the carbon equation.
- Steps towards ecological regeneration will have far-reaching and exponential benefits to environment and society and provide natural fire mitigation.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

‘Out of control’: Unprecedented fires ravage Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands
- Stretching 210,000 sq km across Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay, the Pantanal is the world’s largest tropical wetland. In Brazil, it stretches across the states of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul. The Pantanal is home to many different species of plants and animals, some of them threatened with extinction.
- Fueled by a toxic combination of searing temperatures and high winds, the Brazilian Pantanal was hit by unprecedented fires that engulfed at least 2.4 million hectares across the region in October and November 2019.
- Then in January, just two months after the first bout and during what is supposed to be the rainy season, fires erupted once again. Both times, fires invaded well into Pantanal Matogrossense National Park.
- Local sources say the fires were primarily the result of burning by farmers that spread out of control over an El Niño-dried landscape. Firefighters were caught largely unprepared for the unseasonal fires, as the state normally disassembles its response forces in December and enters a phase of planning for the next fire season. After burning for over a month, the fires were extinguished when rains finally fell in mid-February.

Burning and bullets: Forest fires push Bornean orangutans into harm’s way
- Last year, a female orangutan in Indonesian Borneo was rescued after leaving her burned habitat.
- Experts later found signs of a recent pregnancy and also injuries to the animal.
- Wildfires in Indonesian Borneo last year led to an increase in the number of human-orangutan conflicts and wildlife rescues.
- Conservationists have called for stronger efforts to end forest fires and protect orangutan habitats.

Early deforestation numbers for 2019 reveal trends in the Amazon
- The Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project, or MAAP, an initiative of the nonprofit organization Amazon Conservation, has published its analysis of preliminary deforestation data for the Amazon in 2019.
- The figures project that deforestation in 2019 tapered, if slightly, or held relatively steady in four of the five Amazon countries included in the study.
- Bolivia’s loss of forest in 2019 rose in comparison with 2018, likely as a result of widespread fires that burned standing forest.
- The researchers used early-warning alerts of tree cover loss in 2019 to estimate total deforestation in the five countries and then compared the figures with historical rates going back to 2001.

Escalating firestorms could turn Amazon from carbon sink to source: Study
- A new study finds that the Brazilian Amazon could be moving from being a carbon storehouse to a carbon source — putting the regional and global climate at great risk. Intensifying wildfires could contribute to that shift happening by mid-century.
- Researchers used models to show that an increasingly hot, dry Amazon climate, coupled with deforestation, could trigger wildfires burning up to 16% of the rainforest in Brazil’s Southern Amazon by 2050, releasing up to 17 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide.
- The team’s models indicated that Amazon fires will likely continue intensifying before 2030, due to more frequent heat and drought conditions caused by global warming, and as rampant deforestation due to agribusiness expansion dries out the understory and creates more flammable forest edges.
- Of great concern, the study also found that over time, fires won’t just impact edge areas, but intact forest, deep inside indigenous reserves and other conserved areas. Reduced sources of fire ignition and fire suppression could decrease the likelihood of burning, especially if accompanied by a decrease in global carbon emissions.

Upset about Amazon fires last year? Focus on deforestation this year (commentary)
- Satellites reveal the true story of the 2019 Brazilian Amazon fires, and how to avoid a repeat in 2020.
- The common media narrative, and resulting public perception, is that large uncontrolled fires were raging through the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, causing vast destruction and deforestation. Subsequent analysis of extensive satellite imagery archives, however, has quietly revealed the opposite scenario: many of the fires were actually burning the remains of areas that were recently deforested.
- That is, the recent deforestation surge fueled the 2019 Brazilian Amazon fires. The fires were in fact a lagging indicator of recent deforestation. Such information provides a much more focused target for the world’s outcry and related policy actions than just focusing on the fires alone.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Indonesia forest fires push orangutans into starvation mode, study finds

JAKARTA — The fires that raze vast swaths of Indonesian Borneo every year are having a lasting health impact on the region’s critically endangered orangutans that threatens them with extinction, a preliminary study has found. The fires, which in nearly all cases are started to clear land for plantations, such as oil palm, reduce the […]
Indonesia’s fires burned mostly abandoned and degraded land, not forests
- More than three-quarters of the area burned during this year’s fire season in Indonesia were idle or abandoned lands, and not rainforest, a new analysis shows.
- Only 3 to 3.6 percent of the total burned area constituted forested landscapes, according to the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).
- The findings highlight the importance of protecting these areas and restoring them to prevent future recurrences of fires, CIFOR says.
- Much of these areas used to be peatlands, which according to a new report by Greenpeace continue to be burned by oil palm and pulpwood companies supplying some of the biggest household brands in the world.

Our fires weren’t as bad as in the Amazon, Indonesian officials claim
- Indonesian officials say their handling of forest fires this year has been much better than in other places, including the Amazon.
- But while the claim of a smaller burned area than in the Amazon holds true, the Indonesian fires have churned out nearly double the greenhouse gas emissions as the burning in Brazil.
- Environmental activists also say the much-touted regulations and preventive measures credited with keeping the fires from getting much bigger were largely ineffective, given the scale of the burning.
- Officials say they plan to adopt technological solutions for the upcoming fire season, including cloud seeding and the use of drones for early detection of hotspots.

‘A crisis situation’: Extinctions loom as forests are erased in Mozambique
- Small mountains called “inselbergs” are scattered widely across the central and northern Mozambique landscape. They are crowned by rainforests, which are homes to species that have evolved in isolation for millennia.
- Inselberg forests are Mozambique’s last inland primary forests. But they’re getting smaller and smaller as humans burn them for agriculture and to flush out game animals, and chop them down for lumber and charcoal.
- One such inselberg is Mount Nallume, which researchers recently surveyed during a November expedition. While there, they found chameleons that they suspect may be a new species
- However, Nallume’s forest is disappearing quickly, with the researchers estimating it may be gone in five to 15 years if deforestation continues at its current rate. They urge the government of Mozambique to do more to protect these “islands in the sky” before they, and the unique animals that live in them, disappear forever.

In a season of wildfire, three strategies that work (commentary)
- Climate change projections tell us that the extremes of wildfire season could soon become the rule, rather than the exception. As evidenced in recent years, irregular precipitation patterns and changes in temperature will result in an extended wildfire season and more intense fires.
- Successful adaptation strategies have been employed in response to three particular impacts to forest habitats: the introduction of invasive species, the devastation of tree species, and post-fire erosion.
- Each of these adaptation actions has contributed to a reduction in wildfire spread for specific ecosystems. In turn, this means greater survival for key wildlife species and more vibrant, thriving landscapes as a whole.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Indigenous-wildlife ranger collaboration conserves rare Australian rainforests
- A collaboration between Indigenous ranger groups and ecologists is working to conserve a rainforest system in northwestern Australia.
- Monsoon vine thickets are remnant, scarcely distributed rainforests located in the Kimberley region of Western Australia and are susceptible to wildfire, land clearing and weed infestation if not properly maintained.
- Yawuru, Nyul Nyul and Bardi Jawi Indigenous ranger groups have partnered with Environs Kimberley’s Kimberley Nature Project for over a decade to conserve monsoon vine thickets through revegetation and fire management.
- Due chiefly to this collaboration’s efforts in maintaining, documenting and promoting the importance of these forests, monsoon vine thickets have been granted ‘Nationally Endangered Ecosystem’ status in Australia. The rangers and ecologists continue to maintain these unique forests.

‘Timebomb’: Fires devastate tiger and elephant habitat in Sumatra
- Another heavy fire season in Indonesia has taken a toll on the country’s remaining forest. In Sembilang National Park, on the island of Sumatra, fires raged into primary forest that provides vital habitat for critically endangered Sumatran tigers and elephants.
- Satellite data and imagery indicate the fires may have had a big impact on tigers in the park. In total, around 30 percent of tiger habitat in Sembilang burned between August and September. The fires also encroached into the park’s elephant habitat.
- Fires have also reportedly ravaged elephant habitat in Padang Sugihan Sebokor Wildlife Reserve, which lies southeast of Sembilang and serves as a corridor for wild elephants in South Sumatra. One report estimates that half of the reserve has suffered fire damage.
- Researchers say slash-and-burn clearing techniques likely started most of fires in the area, which were then exacerbated by drier-than-usual conditions and underground peat stores left unprotected by policy rollbacks.s

Deforestation preceded fires in ‘massive’ area of Amazon in 2019
- Deforestation watchdog Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project found that 4,500 square kilometers (1,740 square miles) of the Brazilian Amazon was deforested between 2017 and 2019 and then burned.
- The team’s analysis revealed that 65 percent of that deforestation occurred in 2019 alone.
- The research points to the need for policymakers to address deforestation as well as fires.

Fires and greenhouse gases fuel drying of the Amazon
- New research reveals that fires in the Amazon rainforest, used primarily to clear land for agriculture and ranching, are contributing to drier conditions caused by the emissions of climate-warming gases into the atmosphere.
- Fires release “black carbon,” which absorbs energy and causes temperatures to rise, as well as blocking the formation of clouds, creating drier conditions.
- The researchers caution that the rising demand for water combined with scarcer supplies could threaten the forest’s survival.

‘Witnessing extinction in the flames’ as the Amazon burns for agribusiness
- The vast and biodiverse Triunfo do Xingu protected area in the Brazilian Amazon lost 22 percent of its forest cover between 2007 and 2018, with figures this year indicating the rate of deforestation is accelerating.
- The surge in deforestation, driven largely by cattle ranching, is part of a wider trend of encroachment into protected areas across the Brazilian Amazon under the administration of President Jair Bolsonaro, according to conservationists.
- With the widespread clearing slicing up the larger protected area into smaller fragments of forest, human rights advocates worry that it will become increasingly difficult for forest-dependent indigenous communities to survive within it.
- The deforestation is likely to have a far-reaching impact on the biodiversity of the region, which is home to countless species of plants and animals not adapted to living in areas with higher temperatures and less vegetation.

New app tracks down forest fires in Bolivia
- A new app uses aerosol data and recent satellite images to find fires in the forests of Bolivia in real time.
- The application’s creators, from the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project, say the novel use of the aerosol data, originally intended to monitor air quality, represents a significant advance over traditional, temperature-related alerts.
- According to the NGO Friends of Nature Foundation, more than 41,000 square kilometers (15,800 square miles) of Bolivia has burned in 2019.

Panthera: At least 500 jaguars lost their lives or habitat in Amazon fires
- The fires in the Amazon forest in Brazil and Bolivia this year have burned key habitats of at least 500 adult, resident jaguars as of September 17, experts at Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization, estimate. The numbers will continue to increase until the rains come, researchers say.
- In Bolivia in particular, the fires have so far destroyed over 2 million hectares of forest in one of South America’s key “catscape”, a region that Panthera has identified as having the highest predicted density of cat species on the continent.
- Panthera researchers also predict that many more jaguars will also likely starve or turn to killing livestock in neighboring ranches as a consequence of the fires, likely increasing conflict with the ranchers.

Indigenous communities, wildlife under threat as farms invade Nicaraguan reserve
- Nicaragua’s Bosawás Biosphere Reserve straddles the country’s border with Honduras and was declared a UNESCO site in 1997. It comprises one of the largest contiguous rainforest regions in Latin America north of the Amazon Basin and includes 21 ecosystems and six types of forest that are home to a multitude of species, several of which are threatened with extinction.
- According to a report by the Nicaraguan environmental agency MARENA, a little more than 15 percent of the Bosawás reserve had been cleared and converted for agricultural use in 2000. But today, that number stands at nearly 31 percent. Satellite data show deforestation reached the heart of the reserve’s core zone earlier this year.
- Deforestation in Bosawás stems mainly from migration, as people in other parts of the country move to the region looking for fertile land and space to raise cattle and grow crops.
- Indigenous communities are allowed to own land within Bosawás. But sources say land traffickers are selling plots of land to non-indigenous farmers and ranchers, creating conflicts that have caused death on both sides.

Mexican officials battle a tide of fire eating away at a protected reserve
- Fires raged in the Mexican state of Campeche this summer, with NASA satellites picking up nearly 10,000 fire alerts the state so far this year — around twice the number recorded in 2018. This puts 2019 in third place (behind 2003 and barely behind 2013) for the highest incidence of fires in the state since data collection began in 2001.
- Of these fires, 15 percent occurred in protected areas. Several afflicted Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, one of which burned through 3,087 hectares (7,628 acres) before being extinguished.
- Stretching across the central Yucatan Peninsula to the Guatemalan border, the Calakmul Reserve, as well as the Balamku and Balamkin state reserves that sit contiguous with it, comprise more than 1.2 million hectares (3 million acres) of jungle. The reserves are home to some of the country’s most impressive biodiversity and provide vital habitat to threatened animals and plants.
- The main driver of fires in Campeche is slash-and-burn agriculture. Officials worry that fire seasons will only intensify as more people set up farms in the region, and as state funding to fight fires continues to dwindle.

Indonesian minister draws fire for denial of transboundary haze problem
- Indonesia’s environment minister continues to deny that fires in the country are sending toxic haze to neighboring Malaysia and Singapore.
- An environmental activist warns that this stance, which goes against the data presented by Malaysia, risks undermining Indonesia’s credibility.
- The haze is an annual irritant in diplomatic ties between Indonesia and its neighbors, with much of the burning taking place to clear land for oil palm and pulpwood plantations.
- Malaysia has offered to help Indonesia fight the fires, which have sickened tens of thousands of people in Sumatra and Borneo, threatened an elephant reserve, and churned more than 100 millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

DiCaprio joins $5M effort to combat Amazon fires
- In response to rising deforestation and fires in the Amazon, on Sunday actor Leonardo DiCaprio and philanthropists Laurene Powell Jobs and Brian Sheth announced the establishment of a $5 million fund to support indigenous communities and other first responders working to protect the Amazon.
- The Amazon Forest Fund is the first major initiative of the Earth Alliance, which Global Wildlife Conservation, the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, and the Emerson Collective formed in July.
- The fund’s initial grants went to five Brazilian organizations: Instituto Associacao Floresta Protegida, the Coordination of the Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon, Instituto Kabu, Instituto Raoni, and Instituto Socioambiental.
- The establishment of the fund comes amid global outcry over rising deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. After years of declining deforestation in the region, forest clearing spiked in July. Then last week, smoke from land-clearing fires blackened the skies above Sao Paulo, acting as a catalyst for worldwide awareness of the issue.

Greenpeace releases dramatic photos of Amazon fires
- Today Greenpeace Brazil released dramatic photos of fires currently burning through rainforests and agricultural land in the Brazilian Amazon.
- Some of the fires appear to be burning forests with well-developed canopy structure, suggesting that carbon-dense and biodiverse forests are being directly impacted by the fires.
- Greenpeace says its own spatial analysis indicates that 15,749 of the 23,006 hotspots it recorded in the Amazon in the first 20 days of the month were in areas that were forest in 2017.
- Those conclusions provide further evidence that the fires were set intentionally for forest-clearing purposes.

How many fires are burning in the Amazon?
- The fires raging in the Amazon are nearly double over last year, but remain moderate in the historical context.
- The 41,858 fires recorded in the Amazon as of Aug. 24 this year are the highest number since 2010, when 58,476 were recorded by the end of August. But 2019 is well below the mid-2000s, when deforestation rates were very much higher.
- However, this year’s numbers come with an important caveat: the satellites used for hotspot tracking in Brazil have limited capacity to detect sub-canopy fires.
- The hazy, dark skies over São Paulo have focused worldwide attention on the soaring deforestation rates in the Amazon as well as the pro-deforestation policies of President Jair Bolsonaro.

Satellite images from Planet reveal devastating Amazon fires in near real-time
- While many of the images currently being shared on social media and by news outlets are from past fires, satellites can provide a near real-time view of what’s unfolding in the Amazon.
- With near-daily overflights and high-resolution imagery, Planet’s constellation of satellites is providing a clear look at some of the fires now burning in the Brazilian Amazon.
- Beyond dramatic snapshots, those images also provide data that can be mined for critical insights on what’s happening in the Amazon on a basin-wide scale.

Forest loss threatens territorial gibbons in southern Borneo
- Bornean southern gibbons have the largest territories of any species in their genus, a new study has found.
- These large home ranges, combined with the species’ intense territoriality, puts it at particular risk of habitat loss as a result of deforestation and fire.
- The findings of this research demonstrate that this endangered species needs large areas of unbroken forest.

Forest soils take longer to recover from fires and logging than previously thought
- Australian National University’s Elle Bowd led a research team that collected 729 soil cores from 81 sites in the mountain ash forests of southeast Australia. The sampling sites had been subjected to nine different types of disturbances, from wildfires to clearcutting and post-fire salvage logging, at different frequencies in the past.
- The team used the soil samples to look at 22 different soil measures, including key soil nutrients like nitrate, organic carbon, phosphorus, potassium, and sulfur, and how they’d been impacted by disturbances that occurred 8, 34, 78, and 167 years ago.
- Bowd said the team’s findings show that forest soils recover from disturbances slowly over many years — up to 80 years following a wildfire and as many as 30 years after logging, much longer than previously thought.

Research links specific 2017 extreme weather events to climate change
- According to the seventh annual special report by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) probing the causal links between rising global temperatures and extreme weather events, issued last month, climate change made the Northern Great Plains drought of 2017 some 1.5 times more likely and greatly enhanced its intensity by driving long-term reductions in soil moisture.
- For the second year in a row, scientists were able to identify specific extreme weather events that cannot be explained without factoring in Earth’s warming global climate.
- A team of 120 scientists from 10 different countries used historical observations and model simulations to produce the 17 peer-reviewed analyses collected in the BAMS special report examining extraordinary weather events from around the globe that were made more likely or exacerbated by anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change.

Absent for decades, zebras reintroduced to park in southern Tanzania
- Staff from the Wildlife Conservation Society and its partners in Tanzania released 24 zebras into Kitulo National Park on Oct. 12 and 13.
- The Kitulo Plateau in Tanzania’s southern highlands includes high-elevation grasslands, a unique habitat that requires fire and grazing animals to maintain its plant diversity.
- The reintroduction, with plains zebras from Mikumi National Park, is part of a broader effort to “rewild” the southern highlands after decades of wildlife hunting and livestock grazing.

Fire fundamentally alters carbon dynamics in the Amazon
- With higher temperatures and increasingly severe droughts resulting from climate change, fires are becoming a more frequent phenomenon in the Amazon.
- New research finds that fires fundamentally change the structure of the forest, leading it to stockpile less carbon even decades after a burn.
- The research also shows that the burning of dead organic matter in the understory can release far more carbon into the atmosphere than previously thought.

Indonesian government appeals ruling on tighter peat fire regulations
- The Indonesian government is appealing a court ruling ordering it to issue a number of regulations aimed at tackling forest fires.
- The lawsuit was brought by a number of environmental activists from a city in Central Kalimantan, in Indonesian Borneo, one of the regions hit hardest by the massive fires and haze of 2015.
- The government counters that measures it enacted in the wake of those fires already address the activists’ demands, and point to an 85 percent reduction in fire hotspots in 2016 and 2017.
- The activists say they are optimistic that the Supreme Court will rule in their favor, as another bout of fires flares up across parts of Borneo and Sumatra.

Grasslands may trump forests at carbon storage in a warming world
- A new study finds grasslands can be more effective than forests at storing carbon in places prone to drought and wildfire – a condition likely to worsen in many parts of the world.
- This is because grass stores much of its carbon underground in its root mass, which makes it less likely to be released in the event of a fire.
- Its authors say their findings highlight the important role grasslands can play in mitigating global warming. They urge grasslands in semi-arid areas be included in carbon offset schemes and greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets

Backfire: How misinformation about wildfire harms climate activism (commentary)
- In this commentary, Douglas Bevington argues that climate activists may be inadvertently hurting their cause when they repeat erroneous claims about forest fires in the American West.
- Bevington says that fire suppression has caused an ecologically harmful shortage of fire in western forests.
- He adds that forest fire policy is being used as a pretext for logging and biomass energy production.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Amazon forest to savannah tipping point could be far closer than thought (commentary)
- In the 1970s, scientists recognized that the Amazon makes half of its own rainfall via evaporation and transpiration from vegetation. Researchers also recognized that escalating deforestation would reduce this rainfall producing effect.
- A 2007 study estimated that with 40 percent Amazon deforestation a tipping point could be reached, with large swathes of Amazonia switching from forest to savannah. Two newly considered factors in a 2016 study – climate change and fires – have now reduced that estimated tipping point to 20-25 percent. Current deforestation is at 17 percent, with an unknown amount of degraded forest adding less moisture.
- There is good reason to think that this Amazon forest to savannah tipping point is close at hand. Historically unprecedented droughts in 2005, 2010 and 2015 would seem to be the first flickers of such change.
- Noted Amazon scientists Tom Lovejoy and Carlos Nobre argue that it is critical to build in a margin of safety by keeping Amazon deforestation below 20 percent. To avoid this tipping point, Brazil needs to strongly control deforestation, and combine that effort with reforestation. This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Drought-driven wildfires on rise in Amazon basin, upping CO2 release
- Despite a 76 percent decline in deforestation rates between 2003 and 2015, the incidence of forest fires is increasing in Brazil, with new research linking the rise in fires not only to deforestation, but also to severe droughts.
- El Niño, combined with other oceanic and atmospheric cycles, produced an unusually severe drought in 2015, a year that saw a 36 percent increase in Amazon basin forest fires, which also raised carbon emissions.
- Severe droughts are expected to become more common in the Brazilian Amazon as natural oceanic cycles are made more extreme by human-induced climate change.
- In this new climate paradigm, limiting deforestation alone will not be sufficient to reduce fires and curb carbon emissions, scientists say. The maintenance of healthy, intact, unfragmented forests is vital to providing resilience against further increases in Amazon fires.

Audio: The cutting-edge technologies allowing us to monitor ecosystems like never before
- On today’s episode, we discuss the cutting-edge remote sensing technologies used to monitor ecosystems like rainforests and coral reefs. We also listen to a few ecoacoustic recordings that are used to analyze species richness in tropical forests.
- Our first guest today is Greg Asner, who leads the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO) at Stanford University’s Carnegie Institution for Science. Asner invented a technique he calls “airborne laser-guided imaging spectroscopy” that utilizes imaging spectrometers mounted on the Carnegie Airborne Observatory airplane to produce highly detailed data on large and complex ecosystems like tropical forests.
- Our second guest is Mitch Aide, the principal investigator at the University of Puerto Rico’s Tropical Community Ecology Lab. In this Field Notes segment, Aide will play us a few of the audio recordings he’s uploaded to Arbimon as part of his recent research and will explain how these recordings are used to examine species richness in tropical forests.

For Australia’s fire-starting falcons, pyromania serves up the prey
- Australia’s indigenous peoples have long spoken of birds of prey intentionally starting bushfires to flush out prey.
- In a new study, researchers have now compiled observations and anecdotes from scientific reports, firefighters and Aboriginal peoples to get a better understanding of how such bird-caused fires spread in Australia’s Northern Territory.
- Overall, most instances of fire-spreading by birds seem to be intentional, the authors say, but it is hard to say how common such fires are.

Study on economic loss from Indonesia’s peat policies criticized
- A recent study estimates that Indonesia’s various peat-protection policies could lead to $5.7 billion in economic losses.
- Those losses arise mainly from the pulp and palm oil industries, which are now obliged to conserve and restore peatlands that fall within their concessions.
- Researchers and officials have criticized the study, saying it fails to make a holistic accounting of the environmental, social, health and climate costs from the continued destruction of carbon-rich peat areas.
- They warn the study’s findings could be used to undermine policies aimed at preventing a repeat of the 2015 fires that cost Indonesia an estimated $16 billion from economic disruption.

Indigenous forests could be a key to averting climate catastrophe
- A new study finds the world’s tropical forests may no longer be carbon sinks, with a net loss of 425 million tons of carbon from 2003 to 2014. Also, 1.1 billion metric tons of carbon is emitted globally from forested areas and land use annually — 4.4 billion metric tons are absorbed by standing forests on managed lands, but 5.5 billion metric tons are released via deforestation and degradation.
- As a result, curbing deforestation and degradation is now seen by scientists as a vital strategy for nations to meet the carbon reduction goals set in Paris in 2015, and of averting a catastrophic 2 degree Celsius rise in temperatures by the end of the century.
- Other new research finds that indigenous and traditional community management of forests could offer a key to curbing emissions, and give the world time to transition to a green energy economy. In a separate study, Amazon deforestation rates were found to be five times greater outside indigenous territories and conservation units than inside.
- “We are a proven solution to the long-term protection of forests, whose survival is vital for reaching our [planetary] climate change goals,” said an envoy of a global indigenous delegation in attendance at COP23 in Bonn, Germany. The delegation wants the world’s nations to protect indigenous forests from an invasion by global extraction industries.

Catastrophic fires sweep through iconic Brazilian national park
- Wildfires have consumed more than a quarter of Chapada dos Veadeiros National Park, a much visited and beloved Brazilian preserve known for its biodiversity, spectacular waterfalls and ancient bedrock.
- Though 2017 has been a very dry year, authorities suspect arson, with the park’s enlargement from 65,000 to 240,000 hectares earlier this year a possible motive.
- Firefighters have now contained the blaze and the park has reopened.
- The fire destroyed at least 65,000 hectares of habitat. It will be years before the preserve’s flora and fauna recover, say experts.

First real test for Jokowi on haze as annual fires return to Indonesia
- Land and forest fires have broken out in pockets of Indonesia since mid-July.
- Last year the country caught a break, when a longer-than-normal wet season brought on by La Niña helped mitigate the fire threat.
- This year, hotspots have started appearing in regions with no history of major land and forest fires, like East Nusa Tenggara and Aceh.
- The government has responded by declaring an emergency status as well as deploying firefighters.

Visualizing the impacts of human disturbance on tropical forest biodiversity
- Efforts to protect biodiversity often focus on keeping forests and the habitat they represent from being cut down. But research published in the journal Nature last year suggests that forest degradation resulting from human activities is perhaps just as urgent a threat to biodiversity as deforestation.
- According to the study, man-made disturbances in Pará’s tropical forests have resulted in levels of biodiversity loss equivalent to clearing 92,000 to 139,000 square kilometers (around 35,500 to 53,700 square miles) of pristine forest.
- If that kind of raw data is hard to wrap your brain around, that’s where Silent Forest comes in. Thiago Medaglia described it as “a journalistic data visualization project” in an email to Mongabay.

‘Out of control’ wildfires damage protected areas in northern Peru
- A new analysis of satellite data describes dozens of fires that invaded protected areas throughout northern Peru in the last few months of 2016.
- The rainy season has since extinguished the fires, but not before they burned through an estimated 2,668 hectares of protected habitat
- Representatives from Peru’s National Protected Areas Service (SERNANP) say they met the fires head-on and are working on ways to mitigate similarly severe fire seasons in the future, but critics say their efforts were lacking in 2016.

‘Last frontiers of wilderness’: Intact forest plummets globally
- More than 7 percent of intact forest landscapes, defined as forest ecosystems greater than 500 square kilometers in area and showing no signs of human impact, disappeared between 2000 and 2013.
- In the tropics, the rate of loss appears to be accelerating: Three times more IFLs were lost between 2011 and 2013 as between 2001 and 2003.
- The authors of the study, published January 13 in the journal Science Advances, point to timber harvesting and agricultural expansion as the leading causes of IFL loss.

The alarming number of fires in the Brazilian Amazon
- The sharp decrease in the annual rates of forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon is celebrated worldwide. The trend started in 2005 after a peak in deforestation the year before.
- However, the figures are not so bright when it comes to forest fires, and few people are talking about that.
- The number of fires in the Brazilian Amazon is alarming, and that was especially true in 2015, when a sharp increase in forest fires occurred.

The biologist terrifying the US Forest Service and the timber and forest fire-fighting industries
- In 1993, the Forest Service began managing for spotted owl habitat, implementing standards intended to reduce logging in owl territories, though cutting trees was still allowed. Since then, populations of spotted owls have crashed all across Forest Service lands in California.
- Monica Bond is a wildlife biologist who has spent the past 15 years becoming an expert on spotted owls and forest fires. Earlier this month, she published a paper summarizing all existing science about what happens to spotted owls when forests burn, in the hope of averting a major US forest management policy mistake.
- “Everyone expected fire to be bad for owls, but the data showed no effect on survival, reproduction, or site occupancy,” Bond said. “Our data showed fire wasn’t the owl-eating monster we had all believed it to be.”

NASA images show the Amazon could be facing an intense wildfire season this year
- Conditions created by the strong El Niño event that warmed up Pacific waters in 2015 and early 2016 altered rainfall patterns around the world.
- In the Amazon basin, that meant reduced rainfall during the wet season, plunging some parts of the region into severe drought.
- Per NASA’s Amazon fire forecast, the wildfire risk for July to October now exceeds the risk in 2005 and 2010 — the last time the region experienced severe drought and wildfires raged across large swaths of the rainforest.

Scientists blame Smokey Bear for making U.S. forests less resilient
- Strict anti-fire policy was implemented in the 1940s aimed at stomping out wildfires and preventing them from starting.
- But many scientists and wildlife experts say fire suppression can be harmful to ecosystems.
- A new study finds fire suppression has contributed to a big compositional change in eastern U.S. forests, with less resilient tree species supplanting drought- and fire-resistant species.

Why is Tasmania burning, and why are scientists worried?
- On January 13, dry lightning strikes sparked off a series of fires in Tasmania’s west and north, which have ravaged more than 107,000 hectares of land so far, according to the Tasmanian Fire Service.
- The fire is burning through Tasmania’s World Heritage Wilderness area that is home to unique vegetation found nowhere else in the world.
- Over the past decade, dry lighting-caused fire instances have increased in Tasmania, which scientists say is linked to climate change.

What’s that forest worth? Disaster assistance (finally!) takes nature into account
- A backyard shed gets destroyed by fire, that’s a $2,000 loss. But when 77,000 acres of Yosemite National Park are reduced to smoking embers? Nada.
- It was only after calculating the dollar value of the forests destroyed by a 400-square mile swath of California near Yosemite in 2013 that Governor Jerry Brown was able to secure federal funds to help the state and its residents cope with the loss.
- Fast forward to 2016, when the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) awarded $1 billion to 13 communities through the National Disaster Resilience Competition — and actually required applicants to calculate the value of nature and other non-traditional benefits in their proposals.

What’s ahead for rainforests in 2016? 10 things to watch
- Between Indonesia’s massive forest fires, the official approval of REDD+ at climate talks in Paris, and the establishment of several major national parks, there was plenty to get excited about in the world of rainforests during 2015. What’s in store for 2016?
- Here are a few things we’ll be watching closely in the new year.
- What are other rainforest-related things to watch in 2016? Add your thoughts via the comment function below.

Here Are The Top 15 Environmental Stories of 2015
- This was a year that saw President Obama reject the Keystone pipeline as historic droughts and a vicious wildfire season wracked the western US and Canada.
- The world committed to climate action in Paris as Southeast Asia was choking on the worst Indonesian haze in years.
- Shell aborted its plans to drill in the Arctic for the “foreseeable” future and ExxonMobil is being investigated for lying to the public about climate risks.

Sharp rise in wildfires in the Brazilian Amazon over the past 16 years
- Since 1999 there has been a 65% increase in wildfires in the country.
- Once an area is affected by fires, its forests can take up to 50 years to regenerate, depending on the ecosystem.
- The latest wildfire struck two months ago and was also the largest, devastating about one-third of the indigenous territory of Arariboia, in the state of Maranhão

Riau emergency status to end as S. Sumatra pledges peat clampdown
- Indonesia’s Riau province will drop its official state of emergency at the end of the month.
- The South Sumatra provincial government pledged to stop the granting of licenses on peat.
- Central Kalimantan’s acting governor said the local government did not have adequate plans in place to mitigate the risks of fires.

The impacts of haze on Southeast Asia’s wildlife
- Authorities and researchers are still shockingly ignorant of the ecological impacts of the smoke from Indonesia’s annual fires.
- Some creatures are likely finding it harder to sing, which is often crucial for attracting mates, defending territory and more.
- An orangutan disease called airsacculitis might be more prevalent during the smoky season.

VP Kalla fans flames in Manila as Indonesia presses on with water bombing
- Kalla made the exact same comments blaming foreign companies during a forestry summit in Jakarta in April.
- Satellite data from Global Forest Watch show more than 20 fires burning close to the mouths of the Lumpur and Mesuji rivers.
- Indonesian government water bombing operations continue to target smoldering peat fires in South Sumatra province.

Rapidly-spreading fire destroyed over half of the Amazon forest in the Brazilian state of Maranhão
- Over half of Maranhão’s primary forest (around 220 hectares) was destroyed.
- Over 300 firefighters were called in to what has been called one of the biggest fire combat operations in the history of Brazil.
- The state environmental agency estimates longterm damage to soil quality, greater susceptibility to erosion, and a change in biological dynamics — all of which raise the risk of extinction of rare species present in the region.

From fires to floods: Indonesia’s disaster agency prepares for rain
- Singapore’s health ministry said it would end a government subsidy scheme for people in need of treatment from haze-related illnesses.
- Environmental pressure groups and NGOs met in Jakarta on Monday to discuss the government’s draft pledge to the UN climate summit.
- Researchers at King’s College London have been awarded a six-month grant by the Natural Environment Research Council.

Singapore calls end of haze this year as Indonesia continues to push peat plans
- The Indonesian government continues to work on enacting regulations to address the underlying causes of the annual fires.
- Vice president Jusuf Kalla said Indonesia would target 2-3 million hectares of peatland restoration by 2020.
- The government intends to form an agency for peatland restoration but has yet to decide on the specifics.

There have been more than 11,000 fires in just one region of the Brazilian Amazon this year
- Satellite images revealed that on October 4, 2015 there were over 900 fires burning in the Brazilian Amazon at once.
- The region most affected by the fires was the northern state of Amazonas, where some 11,114 forest fires were recorded this year.
- If the Pacific El Niño continues to strengthen, researchers expect fire risk in the Amazon to increase, as well.

APP pumps South Africa specialists to join haze fire fight
- Working on Fire’s managing director for Asia-Pacific expressed confidence fires on APP supplier concessions could be extinguished soon.
- The South African program has hundreds of additional firefighters on standby.
- An NGO said it had seen more sightings of raptors over East Java after a slow October migration east.

Raja Ampat fires destroy livelihoods; Sumatrans suffer from drought amid haze
- Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla called on all Muslims to pray for rain on Wednesday and to ask God for “forgiveness, guidance and mercy.”
- An aide to Kalla said companies could announce force majeur if the government declared a national disaster.
- Malaysia continues to push Indonesia to adopt tube wells in its peatlands in Kalimantan and Riau.

Jokowi hints at company crackdown as Kalimantan residents prepare haze class action suit
- Residents in West Kalimantan have banded together to file a lawsuit against the government over pollution.
- Jokowi has said companies need to take “greater responsibility.”
- An Indonesian resort plans to offer “more underwater activities” to manage the impact of annual pollution from fires and hotspots.

Researchers look to the past to predict future wildfires in a warming world
- A team led by researchers from the University of Wyoming reconstructed the 2,000-year wildfire history of the Rocky Mountains in northern Colorado by examining charcoal accumulation in the sediments of 12 lakes.
- The only time the Rocky Mountains experienced an increase in size and frequency of forest fires was during a period known as a Medieval Climate Anomaly, when temperatures rose as much as they have today.
- Researchers conclude that even modest regional warming trends can cause exceptionally large areas to burn.

Oil palm firm in hot water after Jokowi drops in on forest fires
- Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo paid an impromptu visit to South Sumatra, where forest fires are raging, and was appalled by the state of a particular oil palm company’s concession.
- District government officials say they will follow up with an investigation into which companies deserve to have their permits revoked, and the central government can decide whether to pull the trigger.
- One conservationist called for more community management of peatlands, arguing that it will reduce fire outbreaks.

Haze chokehold spurring efforts to save Indonesia’s forests
- Haze from Indonesian fires is causing regional health problems and potentially contributing to climate change.
- Many fires are destroying valuable wildlife habitat.
- The impending El Nino weather pattern may make this year’s dry season – and subsequent fires – worse than usual.

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