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According to a report released Wednesday, wildfires in Brazil last year ravaged an area larger than the entire country of Italy. This alarming destruction highlights the ongoing struggle Brazil faces, where blazes—often intentionally ignited by farmers and ranchers seeking to illegally expand their land—continue to devastate vast swaths of the Amazon and other critical ecosystems.
In 2024, approximately 30.8 million hectares—equivalent to 119,000 square miles—of vegetation were scorched across Brazil, marking a staggering 79 percent increase compared to the previous year, according to the monitoring platform MapBiomas. This dramatic rise in destruction highlights the escalating scale of environmental degradation in the country.
Fires in the Amazon, which serves as an essential carbon sink and one of the world’s richest biodiversity hotspots, were responsible for 58 percent of the destruction in Brazil. This alarming statistic presents a difficult challenge for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government, as he prepares to host the UN COP30 climate summit in the Amazonian city of Belém later this year, with the international spotlight on Brazil’s environmental policies.
The 2024 wildfire season has seen the largest area of forest burned since 2019, with 8.5 million hectares destroyed—an alarming increase from 2.2 million hectares in 2023. In a notable and unsettling first, the fires in the Amazon have caused more forest loss than grassland destruction, underscoring the escalating toll on the region’s critical ecosystems.
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“This is a terrible indicator, because, once forests are burned, they become more susceptible to future fires,” said Ane Alencar, of MapBiomas.
Climate change makes vegetation drier and thus more prone to burning.
But in Brazil, the main driver of the fires are ranchers and farmers who clear land for pasture and agriculture — a crime the government struggles to contain.
Lula has made preserving the Amazon a priority of his government, following lax protections against human expansion into the territory under his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro.
But in September, Lula admitted that the country was not “100% prepared” to face a wave of forest fires that his government attributed to “climate terrorism.”
The Brazilian Amazon saw its highest number of fires in 17 years in 2024, government data published earlier this month showed, after the vast biome suffered months of a lengthy drought.
There were 140,328 fires detected by satellite imaging over the year, according to the National Institute for Space Research (INPE).
That was 42 percent more than the 98,634 fires recorded in 2023 — and the most since 2007, when 186,463 forest fires were seen.
Those figures, as well as Wednesday’s, come after some hope last year when the INPE said that deforestation in the region had fallen by more than 30 percent in the 12-month period to August 2024.
Scientists warn that continued deforestation will put the Amazon on track to reach a point where it will emit more carbon than it absorbs, accelerating climate change.
