Brazil sees its worst forest fires in 14 years, exposing Lula and state governors’ lack of preparation

The forest fires devouring Brazil and Portugal have synchronized TV news programs in two countries united by a shared language and history. One of the nations is gigantic, spanning an area 90 times larger than that of its colonizing power. The media’s comparison of the pair’s respective fire-fighting measures has revealed Brazil’s inability to combat the country’s worst fire crisis since 2010.

The South American country’s environmental agency has deployed some 4,000 brigadiers (a record-breaking number), 22 aircrafts and 1,000 vehicles to beat back the flames. In Portugal, meanwhile, there are 6,500 brigadiers, 42 aircraft and 1,900 vehicles. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his government’s reaction has been “timid, insufficient and late response that falls far short of the aggressiveness of the fires and environmental crimes,” according to Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, a network formed by 120 Brazilian non-profits.

Three months after devastating floods inundated the state of Rio Grande do Sul, the climate emergency is once again rearing its head in Brazil. The country has been burning for two and a half months thanks to blazes fed by a historic drought — Brazil’s worst in 70 years — and organized crime, which took advantage of the former presidential administration of Jair Bolsonaro to install itself in the Amazon and other delicate ecosystems.

A few days away from the beginning of spring in the southern hemisphere, smoke covers 60% of the country. There are around 190,000 wildfire outbreaks, double the number in 2023, according to figures from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE). The fires have caused greenhouse gas emissions to shoot up by 60% over the last quarter, and have claimed an unknown number of lives. This wave of fires is quantitatively worse than what was seen in Bolsonaro’s first year in office, which helped to confirm him as one of the planet’s foremost environmental villains.

Astrini says that in 2019, the Bolsonaro government refused to take action against the fires (it even rejected an offer to help from the G7) but that there weren’t the extreme drought conditions currently being experienced by Brazil. “Now, there’s a response from the government, but it’s coming late. The president is not materially nor mentally prepared to take on the climate crisis. They didn’t believe that this was going to happen,” says Astrini. He says the first meeting the president held with his ministers to address the fires took place last Monday, when the environmental disaster had already grown to enormous proportions.

At that meeting, a scientist explained the grave situation. Afterward, Lula announced that he had dedicated an extraordinary $95 million in funding towards fighting the fires and drought. The president had surrendered to the reality of the situation.

“The concrete fact is that today in Brazil, we were not 100% prepared to deal with these things [extreme weather events]. Ninety percent of cities are not prepared. Few states have [enough] preparation, Civil Defense, firefighters, almost no one,” says Astrini. With the extra funds, Brazil plans to rent aircrafts, hire more firefighters and brigadiers, mobilize the military and police and provide food to those who have been affected.

The majority of those fighting the fires on the front lines are brigadiers from small local communities, including Indigenous populations. Training is key, as Rodrigo Agostinho, the president of the state-run Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, told O Globo this week. “Many people think that hiring firefights and brigadiers is easy. You can’t use someone without experience, that is incredibly dangerous. We need to vet and train them,” explained Agostinho.

In addition to asking for more resources, he warned that the number of professionals who have been deployed is record-breaking, but that there have been logistical difficulties involved with transporting and feeding them. The size of Brazil is another challenge — the country covers double the territory of the European Union.

Climate events are multiplying and becoming more and more virulent in Brazil — the same trend seen across the planet. In June, floods inundated the state of Rio Grande do Sur for weeks, killing some 200 people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless.

The fire outbreak is so critical that locals in Brasília, Porto Velho and hundreds of other Brazilian cities need only open their window to know that the crisis is far from over. Respiratory problems have spiked, even striking one Supreme Court judge, who was hospitalized due to pulmonary inflammation. Images from the European satellite Copernicus show flames advancing towards the western flank of South America and the Atlantic. The situation has also become serious in Bolivia, Venezuela and Peru.

President Lula and his Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, Marina Silva, suspect that criminals are behind the devastating blazes. Environmentalists believe that the fires were intentionally started because, as Astrini explains, in Amazonian areas where vegetation is healthy, there is usually too much moisture for fires to start. What’s more, in the ecosystems of Cerrado and the Pantanal, it’s been more than a month since any lightening storms took place. Forest fires can be started by humans from attempts to create illegal clearings or agricultural fields, or from cooking fires that spiral out of control. To prevent the situation from worsening, governors have banned all fires, even those associated with traditional forest management.

The 2019 outbreak began with a fire day organized by Bolsonaro-affiliated farmers. Five years later, none have been punished for their involvement. Now, the government wants to institute harsher penalties for arson, but Congress has been resistant to such measures, though the environmental lobby in Brazil is becoming stronger and more influential. In any case, accusations against arsonists that have actually been prosecuted are a drop in the bucket compared to the magnitude of the current tragedy. One hundred cases are brought a year at the most, while fire outbreaks have risen to the tens of thousands.

Currently, the government’s actions are limited by budgetary concerns, since efforts to fight fires are largely under the states’ purview. Many governors boycott federal programs or are reluctant to take action against the blazes, due to complicity with the organized crime organizations that are plundering jungles, because they continue to be aligned with Bolsonaro’s anti-environmentalist discourse, a lack of resources, or a combination of various factors. But even the federal government has yet to take a firm stance on coordinating efforts.

Environmentalist non-profits are also warning of a significant, related shift. In this outbreak of fires, living vegetation has also been going up in flames, no longer just affecting areas that have been cleared and developed. Brazilian ecologists know that little authorities could not have prevented the drought, but few efforts have been made to apprehend criminals, who have largely dodged criminal penalties. Such experts say that putting out fires should rarely have to take place, and that ideally, they would be prevented from happening in the first place.

On Wednesday, Brazil expressed its solidarity with Portugal via a statement from the Foreign Ministry. After lamenting the loss of life and property due to the fires, Lula’s government made “an appeal to allied countries to redouble their efforts to adapt to the impacts of climate change in order to face the multiplication of extreme natural events.”

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