Unprecedented fires in the wetland have attracted less attention than fires in Australia, the western United States and the Amazon, its well-known brother in the north. But although the Pantanal is not a known call around the world, smart tourists flock there because it is home to unusually higher concentrations of stunning wild animals: jaguars, tapirs, endangered giant otters and bright blue hyacinths. Like a giant bathtub, the wetland inflates with water in the rainy season and empties the dry months. In a just way, this rhythm has a call that evokes a beating heart: the impulse of the flood.
The wetland, which is larger than Greece and covers parts of Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia, also provides invisible gifts to a South American giant by regulating the cycle of water on which life depends. Its countless swamps, lagoons and tributaries purify water and save water. floods and droughts. They also buy incalculable amounts of carbon to stabilize the climate.
For centuries, shepherds have used the chimney to transparent fields and new lands, but this year, drought aggravated by climate change has turned wetlands into a powder keg and chimneys burn uncontrolled.
“The scale of the chimneys is amazing,” Douglas C said. all sorts of unprecedented circumstances. “
His research showed that at least 22% of the Pantanal in Brazil has burned since January, the worst fires, in August and September, burning for two consecutive months.
They are also worse than in the reminiscence of the Guato people, an indigenous organization whose ancestors have lived in the Pantanal for thousands of years.
Guato’s leaders in an indigenous territory known as Ba’a dos Guat said the chimneys were spreading from the ranches around their land and that satellite photographs verify that the flames had spread from the outside when the chimney began to close in the space of Sandra Guat-Silva, network leader and healer, struggled to save her with the help of her son , grandson and a ship captain with a hose.
For many desperate hours, he said, they threw buckets of water from the river and sprayed dominance around the space and its palm roof, controlled it to protect it, but at least 85% of its people’s territory burned down, according to the Central Institute. life, a non-profit organization that monitors land use in the domain. On the other side of the Pantanal, almost part of the indigenous land has caught fire, as discovered by a research journalism organization called Agnoncia Peblica.
Now, Guat Silva mourns the loss of nature itself: “It makes me sick,” he said. The birds no longer sing, I no longer hear the song of the chaco chachalaca bird. Even the jaguar that scared me suffers, it hurts. I suffer from depression for that. Now there’s a hollow silence. I feel that our freedom has left us, it has been taken away from us with the nature we have protected.
Now, wetland dwellers, some still coughing after weeks of smoke, have donations of water and food, and are concerned that once the rains arrive in October, the ash will go to the rivers and kill the fish they count on as food and sustenment.
“I still couldn’t think our Pantanal is dead,” said Eunice Morais of Amorim, some other member of the community. “It’s so terrible. “
Scientists are running to calculate an estimate of the animals killed in the fires. While giant mammals and birds have died, many have been able to flee or fly. Turns out it was reptiles, amphibians and small mammals that did the worst. In places like California, small animals take refuge underground during wildfires, but in the Pantanal, scientists say, fires also burn underground, fed through dry wetland plants. One of the most affected places was a national park designated as united World Heritage Site.
“I don’t need to be an alarmist,” said José Sabino, a biologist at Anhanguera-Uniderp University in Brazil who studies the Pantanal, “but in a region where 25% have burned down, there is a massive loss. “
“I told my boss I had to replace jobs,” Tortato said, “I want to be a firefighter. “Instead of returning the house to his family, he spent much of the next two months digging firewalls with an excavator in an urgent attempt to reach the wooded areas.
One September day, running under an orange sky, he and his team finished a huge semicircle firewall, a wide river along one side to protect more than 3,000 hectares, he said, an important safe haven for wildlife. they stood there, content with their achievement, saw burning rubble suddenly leap into the river, igniting the dominance they thought was safe. They ran to the boats and tried to extinguish the spread, but the flames rose temporarily too high.
“This is the moment when we almost lost hope, ” said Tortato. “But the next day we woke up again and again.
Tortato knows of 3 injured jaguars, one with third-degree burns to the legs. They were all treated by veterinarians. Biologists are now in a position for the next wave of hunger-related deaths; first the herbivores, without vegetation, then the carnivores, without the herbivores.
“It’s a cascading effect, ” said Tortato.
Animal rescue volunteers flocked to the Pantanal, took the wounded animals to emerging veterinary triage stations, and left food and water to find them. Larissa Pratta Campos, a veterinary student, helped treat wild boars, swamp deer, birds, primates and a raccoon-like creature called coatí.
“We’re running in the middle of a crisis,” Pratta Campos said. “I woke up several times in the middle of the night to look at the animals here. “
Last week, O Globo newspaper reported that firefighters from Brazil’s main environmental coverage firm were blocked through bureaucratic procedures, delaying their deployment by 4 months.
Given the magnitude of the fires, their long-term consequences on the Pantanal are unclear. Ecosystem meadows can be quickly followed through scrub and swamps in the coming years, Wolfgang J said. Jun, a scientist specializing in the region. But forests will take decades or centuries.
Scientists say that what they tell us about the underlying suitability of wetlands is even more critical than the effect of this year’s fires. As a patient whose upper fever reports a harmful infection, the extent of wildfires is a symptom of serious threats to the Pantanal, both indoors and outdoors.
More than 90% of the Pantanal is privately owned. Farmers have been raising cattle there for many years and environmentalists point out that many do so sustainably, but new farmers are settling in, with little wisdom on how to use the fireplace. C-ti Nunes, scientist at the Brazilian National Institute of Wetland Science and Technology, said C-ti Nunes. In addition, the rearing of farm animals in the highlands has put pressure on local farmers to increase the length of their herds, using more land as they do.
Eubank Campos finds it hard to understand who would appease the chimney when the earth was so dry. “The Pantaneiros know that this is not the time to make burns,” said Eubank Campos, a term for locals that also expresses a culture built for centuries. breeding in the wetland. ” They don’t need to destroy their own land. “
Brazilian federal police are investigating the fires, some of which appear to have been illegally targeted at forests.
However, when asked about the greatest risk to the Pantanal, Eubank Campos’ reaction highlights political and cultural failures in the region. “I’m worried that the organizations that come here need to take advantage of the challenge and in the end ‘close’ the Pantanal, making it a wonderful reserve and expelling the Pantaneiros,” he said.
Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, who campaigned with the promise of weakening conservation regulations, is in the region.
But Eubank Campos with environmentalists at a major risk to the Pantanal coming from its borders and beyond.
Because ecosystems are interconnected, wetland welfare is at the mercy of the agricultural boom in the surrounding highlands. Huge fields of soybeans, other grains and livestock — internationally advertised products — are causing soil erosion entering the Pantanal, obstructing their rivers so severely that some have become accidental dams that deprive the downstream domain of water.
Rampant deforestation and similar fires in the nearby Amazon also create a domino effect, disrupting the “flying rivers” of rainforest rainfall that contribute to precipitation in the Pantanal. Hydroelectric dams divert water, scientists say, and a proposal to channel wetlands. important river would make it drain too fast.
But perhaps the ultimate danger of concern goes even further: climate change. The effects that the models predicted, a much warmer Pantanal alternating between severe droughts and excessive rains, are already being felt, scientists say. poses a “critical threat” to the ecosystem, damaging biodiversity and undermining its ability to help the continent’s water and carbon to the world. In less than 20 years, he discovered that the north of the Pantanal can become savannah or even arid.
“We are digging our grave,” said Karl-Ludwig Schuchmann, an ecologist at the Brazilian National Institute of Wetland Science and Technology and one of the study’s authors.
To save the Pantanal, scientists propose solutions: reduce climate change, practice sustainable agriculture in and around the wetland, pay pastoralists to maintain forests and other herbal spaces on their lands, increase ecotourism. Do not divert the waters of the Pantanal, because its flooding impulse is its life.
“Everyone talks about ‘we have to do this and that,'” Schuchmann said, “but not much has been done. “
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