The Amazon Rainforest Is Burning Again. Join Forces to Call for an #AmazonCeaseFire!
A year ago, the world awoke to one of the worst environmental disasters in a generation. The devastation of the rainforest was met with unprecedented global concern and media visibility, placing immense pressure on the Bolsonaro regime and implicating global companies in the catastrophe.
This season's fires promise to be considerably worse. Every hectare of Amazon forest razed and burned brings the biome – and our climate – ever closer to a catastrophic tipping point. Meanwhile smoke from the fires could aggravate the dire toll of COVID-19 among Brazil's disproportionately affected Indigenous communities.
We all have a role to play in ceasing the destructive cycle pushing the Amazon, and our collective survival, to the edge.
Act now for an Amazon Ceasefire!
Amazon Watch and our allies have identified global corporate actors enabling Bolsonaro's attacks upon the rainforest and its peoples. While explosive deforestation and subsequent criminal arson are driven by illegal logging, land grabbers, and cattle ranchers, leading global firms provide the financial fuel upon which the forest burns.
Background on the Amazon's Burning Season
2020 is the worst start to the burning season in the last decade. July recorded a 28 percent increase in the incidents of fires in Brazil from the same period last year, as well as a 77 percent increase in deforestation on Indigenous lands. In the first two weeks in August there were more than 15,000 outbreaks across the Amazon, including 4,042 in conservation areas and 868 in Indigenous lands.
According to the MAAP project, over 500 illegal major fires in the Brazilian Amazon have occurred in 2020, but with a significant shift in the nature of these fires. Although deforested areas continue to burn – 84 percent of 2020's fires are taking place in recently deforested areas – 11 percent of the fires are occurring in forests. This development signals a grim turning point for the Amazon, as primary rainforests do not burn under normal climatic conditions.
97 percent of the fires in the Brazilian Amazon occurred after President Bolsonaro ordered his 120-day burning moratorium in July, highlighting the ineffectiveness of this order. Since Bolsonaro took office in January 2019, his regime has dismantled several Brazilian state mechanisms for monitoring deforestation, environmental law enforcement, and safeguarding Indigenous rights.
