São Paulo, Brazil – Tormented by weeks of unbearable heat, extremely dry conditions and widespread wildfires, Brazil’s air quality this week reached the worst levels in the world and its breathing is considered “unhealthy” and “dangerous” in many regions .
According to the Swiss company IQAir, a partner of the United Nations that monitors global air quality, the city of Cruzeiro do Sul, in the northern state of Acre, recorded the worst air quality in the world on Monday and Tuesday. Among major cities worldwide, Sao Paulo had the worst air quality over the two days.
In fact, Brazil is drier than the Sahara desert. According to MetSul Meteorology, the phenomenon results from a combination of prolonged drought, while the desert in northern Africa is experiencing higher than usual levels of humidity. While some areas of Sao Paulo reached 7% humidity, regions near the Sahara – such as Cairo, Egypt – had 36% humidity.
The situation is worst in southwest, central-west and northern Brazil, where many cities are in a state of emergency in which authorities recommend that people avoid outdoor activities between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. All this is happening amid temperatures above 30ºC (86 °F), reaching up to 45ºC (113 °F) in cities in the Midwest.
In addition to high temperatures and low humidity, Brazil is also struggling with fires in several areas, not only in the Amazon or other major biomes such as the Cerrado and Pantanal. There are fires from north to south – some naturally occurring and others caused by humans. So far, 15 people have been arrested for setting fires in the state of São Paulo alone. In most cases, these are fires lit to “prepare” the land for agricultural development.
Smoke from the fires has spread across the country, worsening air quality. Major cities such as the capital Brasília and São Paulo have been covered in a visible layer of smoke for days. This smoke can be harmful to public health and hospitals have already reported a 60% increase in respiratory illnesses.
In São Paulo, the country’s largest city, from August to the first week of September, 76 people died of severe acute respiratory syndrome and another 1,523 were diagnosed with the disease. According to pulmonologist Dr. José Branco, the link between fires and public health is “clear and alarming”.
“The increase in respiratory and infectious diseases in the affected regions is a direct reflection of the environmental degradation caused by the fires. It is essential that public officials, health professionals and society work together to mitigate the effects of wildfires,” he wrote in time.
And the weather forecast is not positive for Brazilians: an extremely hot and dry air mass covers most of the country, leading to temperatures above 40ºC (104 °F) and relative humidity below 10%, according to MetSul Meteorology. These conditions, with no chance of rain, are expected to continue through at least Sunday.
Record-breaking fires
According to the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe), an agency that monitors deforestation and forest fires, from January 1 to September 7, 2024, 156,023 fire outbreaks were identified in the country. This is the highest number of fires for the period since 2010, when the country had 163,408 fire outbreaks.
In August, Inpe recorded 68,600 fire outbreaks, with 38,200 in the Amazon (120% more than in August 2023), 18,600 in the Cerrado (a 171% increase), 6,000 in the Atlantic Forest, 4,400 in the Pantanal (a 3.9% increase). , and 1,200 in the Caatinga, the country’s five main biomes.
In the Amazon, the burned area is equivalent to more than 3.5 million Maracanãs, the country’s 80,000-seat soccer stadium. By August 30, 3,505,300 hectares had burned in Brazil, according to data from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, making it the worst August since records began in the area in the late 1990s.
Between Monday and Tuesday, Brazil accounted for 75.9% of all fires in South America. There were 5,132 fire outbreaks in 24 hours, most of them in the Cerrado, located in the Central-West region of the country. According to Ane Alencar, director of Inpe, the fires in 2024 were fueled by a combination of factors, including the second year of El Niño followed by La Niña, global warming and human actions.
“In Brazil, we’ve usually seen severe droughts in the Amazon and part of the Cerrado, but affecting several biomes at the same time is one of the first times. It’s almost a perfect storm, where climate is the engine that drives the fires that come from the fires,” she said.
The situation is so serious that the federal government created a crisis task force to fight the fires. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva traveled to the Amazon to discuss important measures with local authorities. Meanwhile, environmental protection NGOs demand effective action against criminal fires lit by rural producers.
“Brazil has burned due to the dangerous combination of extreme weather events and human actions! We know that, year after year, wildfires consume thousands of hectares of the Brazilian biome and threaten the survival of biodiversity and all of us. But as we close August, the data shows a dramatic and hot path of increase in fire outbreaks for this month, compared to the same period in 2023,” Greenpeace Brazil said in a statement.
According to the environmental NGO, in addition to harming people living nearby, smoke from fires in the Amazon and Pantanal has traveled to remote regions, worsening air quality across the country.
Thais Bannwart, spokesman for Greenpeace Brazil, said the fires are caused by human activity and, in the face of extreme weather events, appear to have become “a cheap strategy for the destruction of nature”.
“Responsible parties should be identified and punished appropriately, and the inability to receive funds in such situations is a measure that should be implemented by banks and regulators,” Bannwart said.
