Why Amazon Fires Keep Raging 10 Years After a Deal to End Them
The immense scale of the fires in Brazil this summer raised a global alarm about the risks they posed to the world’s largest rainforest, which soaks up carbon dioxide and helps keep global temperatures from rising. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
October 10, 2019 | Source: The New York Times | by Clifford Krauss
Many of the thousands of fires burning in Brazil’s Amazon are set by ranchers. A deal inked 10 years ago was meant to stop the problem, but the ecological arson goes on as the Earth warms.
When things go wrong, those in power often promise to make it right. But do they? In this series, The Times investigates to see if those promises were kept.
A smoky, choking haze drifted over a lush rainforest reserve in the Brazilian Amazon last month, as fires lit by cattlemen illegally ranching on protected land spread through the jungle.
From an elevated vantage point, a dozen blazes could be spotted across an 845,000-acre nature preserve.
As damaging as these fires would be to the Serra Do Cachimbo Biological Reserve, they represented just a tiny fraction of the total number burning vast swaths of the Amazon, with 26,000 recorded in August, the highest number in a decade.