The fires in the Amazon, which reaches across nine South American nations, are the result of an extreme drought fueled by climate change, experts said.
The region has been feeling the effects of a natural weather phenomenon known as El Niño, which can worsen dry conditions that were intensified this year by extremely high temperatures.
That has made the rainforest more vulnerable to fast-spreading blazes, said Ane Alencar, the science director at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute in Brazil.
“The climate is leaving forests in South America more flammable,” she said. “It’s creating opportunities for wildfires.”
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A record number of fires so far this year in the Amazon has also raised questions about what may be in store for the world’s biggest tropical rainforest when the dry season starts in June in the far larger southern part of the jungle.
In January, wildfires burned almost 4,000 square miles of the Brazilian Amazon, an almost fourfold increase from the same month last year, according to Mapbiomas, a collective of climate-focused nonprofit organizations and research institutions.
They have burned homes and subsistence crops in several Indigenous villages, leaving a thick haze over rural areas and creating hazardous air quality in the state’s capital, Boa Vista.
Researchers say that most of the fires sweeping through the region were initially set by farmers using the “slash and burn” method to allow new grass to grow on degraded pastures or to fully clear recently deforested land.
This ecosystem, known for its wide-open grasslands and a rare population of wild horses, overlaps with several protected areas, including the Yanomami Indigenous reserve, where illegal mining and forest destruction have led to a humanitarian crisis.
Some of the wildfires started by humans in the Amazon have grown into “megafires,” typically defined as blazes that burn more than 100,000 acres of land or that have an unusually significant effect on people and the environment.
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