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Fires in the Brazilian Amazon will be ‘as bad, if not worse’ than last year’s – researchers have warned.
In August last year, the Amazon Rainforest was reported to have been ‘burning down at record pace’ – with a slew of major news outlets linking the blazes to beef farming.
New data from The Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) suggests around 150,000 hectares of land deforested in 2020 is now at risk – as most of the 2019 fires occurred on land that had recently been deforested, opposed to primary forest.
‘Ratchet up the urgency’
Senior research specialist and director of MAAP Matt Finer told CNN: “Fire season doesn’t start out of nowhere in August. It started a year ago with deforestation.
“We need the intensity of the rage and concern that people had back in August, we need that now to ratchet up the urgency of the situation.”
Data from NASA also shows how 2020 could be another dry year for the Amazon, which increases the risk of fires spreading into primary forest from deforested land.