'We are losing the Amazon rainforest': Record number of wildfires in parts of Brazil

Fire is sucking the life out of parts of the Amazon rainforest. In Roraima State, in northern Brazil, the number of fires in February were more than five times the average, according to data from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, and blazes continued to burn through March.

"We are losing the Amazon rainforest. These changes in the climate right now provoked by El Niño makes this forest fire season even worse than we are used to seeing in the forest," said Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of Brazil's Climate Observatory. 

Wildfires in the normally humid, tropical rainforest have been supercharged by a disastrous combination of elevated temperatures, historic drought and deforestation.

Even as the year-old government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has brought down the rate of deforestation in Brazil by more than 20 per cent, a hot dry 2023 stressed the trees within the Amazon, which stretches into eight countries.

Analysis by Copernicus, a European atmospheric monitoring service, estimates that fires in Brazil released the highest amount of carbon dioxide for the month of February in over two decades. Half of the 45.1 megatons of CO2 released, it reported, came from the fires in Roraima state.

"[In] Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, you also see very high fire activities. This is another kind of proof that the climate is playing a very important role in that," said Ane Alencar, science director for the Amazon Environmental Research Institute.

The Amazon is one of the world's largest carbon sinks, capable of storing more than 150 billion metric tonnes of carbon, equivalent to about 10 years of global greenhouse gas emissions. But with abnormally high temperatures, the majestic green canopy begins to suffer.

"The first thing that the trees do, they shed their leaves and you have right there very good fuel material for the fire," Alencar told CBC News. 

"At the same time that you open the canopy, you allow the exchange of dry air with moist air. So you make that microclimate condition internally in the forest more prone to be burned."

Back in September, as the wildfire season began to wane in North America, Brazil was experiencing the effects of a crippling drought, which began last March. People in Manaus, one of the hubs of the Brazilian Amazon, were choking on smoke. 

Alencar says she checked the levels of particulate matter in the air and compared it to the worst of the fires in Quebec, which sent smoke as far as New York last June, making international headlines with photos of red hazy air hanging over Manhattan. 

The levels were the same or worse in the Amazon, she said. Indigenous communities were breathing that level of smoke daily, but without the outcry observed in North America, according to Alencar.

"This year, we have felt this huge change. The air and the humidity is very low and this has also led to problems with illnesses in families, especially in children," said Cesar Da Silva an Indigenous leader. 

Parts of the Amazon River basin withered, such that transport by boat was nearly inaccessible and mounds of dead fish floated to the surface because of the abnormally warm water. In October, the Amazon's main tributary, Rio Negro, was the lowest it had been since annual records began in the early 1900s.