Brazil Wraps Up Record-Crushing Fire Season; 28% Of Pantanal Burned As Army Spent Money On Itself
The rains arrived in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands in October and are helping put out fires there, but the destruction this year has been immense. A staggering 28% of the biome was consumed by fire according to the Laboratory for Environmental Satellite Applications at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, killing and injuring thousands of animals, likely including iconic wildlife such as jaguars and tapirs.
While this harm is partly due to severe drought in the first part of the year, maybe intensified by escalating climate change, other factors were equally or more important, including illegal deforestation, alleged arson by cattle ranchers and lack of planning to combat the fires, according to Alcides Faria, executive director of the NGO Ecoa (Ecology and Action), who spoke to Mongabay, along with other experts.
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At the same time, environmental agencies IBAMA and ICMBio have suffered successive losses of financial resources — the federal government has already cut the agencies’ greatly reduced budgets for 2021 by 4% and 12.8%, respectively. Environment Minister Ricardo Salles has further closed off the funding spigot by spending only 0.4% of the ministry’s environmental policies budget between January and August 2020.
Simultaneously, the Brazilian Armed Forces, who were deployed to the Amazon by President Jair Bolsonaro in May to fight environmental crimes as part of Green Brazil Operation 2 (GBO2), have been found to be using a portion of the money originally destined to fight Amazon deforestation to upgrade their units. Up to September 24, the 47th Infantry Battalion spent R$ 2.1 million (US $375,000) of the GBO2 total budget (R $418.6 million; US $74.7 million) — for unit improvement in Coxim, Mato Grosso do Sul, a locale far distant from the Amazon, according to documents registered by the National Treasury. The money went, among other things, to roof, flooring and door renovations for unit buildings. Other military bases are said to have seen similar improvements.
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https://news.mongabay.com/2020/11/as-fire-season-ends-brazil-cited-for-failed-amazon-and-pantanal-policies/