Gigantic clouds of smoke hang over the charred vegetation, where wildlife is in complete distress: “out of control” fires are raging in Brazil’s Pantanal, the largest wetland in the world and a protected area for biodiversity.
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The region famous for its jaguars has been hit by fires for several weeks. Satellites from the Brazilian Institute for Space Research (Inpe) detected 2,256 fires in the region from November 1 to 12, 11 times more than in the entire month of November 2022.
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Along the Transpantaneira, a dirt road that crosses the Pantanal, an area that should be completely flooded becomes a small pond. A few caimans swim there as best they can. Outside the water, someone else’s rotting carcass is surrounded by dozens of flies.
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A dead porcupine lies on a carpet of ash in a completely charred forest area. “He probably died of smoke inhalation,” Aracelli Hammann, a veterinarian with a team of volunteers from the Animal Disaster Rescue Group (Grad), told AFP.
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The team made this discovery in the Parc de la Rencontre des Eaux, one of the most affected areas. This park in the state of Mato Grosso (central west) has the largest concentration of jaguars in the world.
According to the NGO Institut Center de Vie (ICV), 32% of the park’s area has been affected by flames for more than a month.
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The other front of the fires is in the Pantanal National Park in the state of Mato Grosso, where 24% of the area has burned.
“The situation is completely out of control and these two fronts are expected to clash soon. With the heat wave and strong winds, the situation will certainly get worse,” warns biologist Gustavo Figueiroa, 31, director of the NGO SOS Pantanal.
“The impact is so strong that it is difficult to measure. The Pantanal is a region accustomed to fires. Normally it is able to regenerate naturally, but here we had never seen such a frequent series of fires,” he says.
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“Domino effect”
According to experts, these fires are caused primarily by human intervention, especially the use of combustion technology for agricultural expansion. But the situation at the end of the year was made worse by an exceptional drought.
“We saw a lot of dead animals, insects, amphibians and small mammals that cannot escape,” says Gustavo Figueiroa.
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“They are part of a food chain and the death of one animal triggers a domino effect until it reaches the jaguar at the top of the chain,” he points out.
The logistical challenges are enormous as most of the places affected by the flames can only be reached by boat.
In the middle of a clearing, monkeys rush towards the bananas and eggs that volunteers have left for them.
“The fires mean that the natural food supply is no longer available to the animals that were able to escape the flames,” explains Jennifer Larreia, 33, president of the É o Bicho association.
During the historic fires that devastated the region in 2020, his NGO distributed 300 tons of fruit in five months.
The Pantanal extends over an area of more than 170,000 km2, south of the Amazon, in the areas of Brazil, but also Bolivia and Paraguay.
According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), 656 species of birds, 159 species of mammals, 325 species of fish, 98 species of reptiles, 53 species of amphibians and more than 3,500 species of plants live here.