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The World’s Largest Tropical Wetland Has Become an Inferno
By Catrin Einhorn, Maria Magdalena Arréllaga, Blacki Migliozzi and Scott Reinhard
This year, roughly a quarter of the vast Pantanal wetland ∈Brazil, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, has burned ∈ wildfires worsened by climate change. What happens to a rich and unique biome when so much is destroyed?
The unprecedented fires ∈ the wetland have attracted less attention than blazes ∈Australia, the Western United States and the Amazon, its celebrity sibling to the north. But while the Pantanal is not a global household name, tourists ∈ the know flock there because it is home to exceptionally high concentrations of breathtaking wildlife: Jaguars, tapirs, endangered giant otters and bright blue hyacinth macaws. Like a vast tub, the wetland swells with water during the rainy season and empties out during the dry months. Fittingly, this rhythm has a name that evokes a beating heart: the flood pulse.
The wetland, which is larger than Greece and stretches over parts of Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia, also offers unseen gifts to a vast swath of South America by regulating the water cycle upon which life depends. Its countless swamps, lagoons and tributaries purify water and help prevent floods and droughts. They also store untold amounts of carbon, helping to stabilize the climate.
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Naturally occurring fire plays a role ∈ the Pantanal, ∈ addition to the burning by ranchers. The flames are usually contained by the landscape’s mosaic of water. But this year’s drought sucked these natural barriers dry. The fires are far worse than any since satellite records began.
The fires are also worse than any ∈ the memory of the Guató people, an Indigenous group whose ancestors have lived ∈ the Pantanal for thousands of years.
Guató leaders ∈ an Indigenous territory called Baía dos Guató said the fires spread from the ranches that surround their land, and satellite images confirm that the flames swept ∈ from the outside. When fire started closing ∈ on the home of Sandra Guató Silva, a community leader and healer, she fought to save it with the help of her son, grandson and a boat captain with a hose.
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Now Ms. Guató Silva mourns the loss of nature itself. “It makes me sick,” she said. “The birds don’t sing anymore. I no longer hear the song of the Chaco chachalaca bird. Even the jaguar that once scared me is suffering. That hurts me. I suffer from depression because of this. Now there is a hollow silence. I feel as though our freedom has \left us, has been taken from us with the nature that we have always protected.”
Disponível em: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/13/climate/pantanalbrazil-fires.html Acesso em: 12 nov. 2020.
According to the data analyzed and reported by The New York Times agency, “The fires are far worse than any since satellite records began”.
By reading the graph, the months when the cumulative ∑ of fire detections across Pantanal started to increase were:
