• Between January and December 2024, fires in Brazil spread across 308,000 square kilometres.
• In the Amazon alone, 179,000 square kilometres burned — more than the national total for 2023.
• The forest protection measures championed by Lula have not been enough: drought and arson are taking their toll.

Between January and December 2024, Brazil saw fires spread across 308,000 square kilometres. On its own, that figure may not say much. To put it in context, it helps to recall that Italy's total surface area is roughly 302,000 square kilometres. The data come from the Monitor do fogo platform run by MapBiomas.

The extent of fires in Brazil grew by 79 per cent in a single year

Looking at the historical series, it is clear that 2024 was a record year. Since 2019, the year MapBiomas began tracking fires in Brazil, the burned area had always fallen between 140,000 and 180,000 square kilometres. Last year's figure of 308,000 marks an increase of as much as 79 per cent compared to 2023 — an additional 136,000 sq km, roughly the surface area of a country like Greece. Also alarming is the fact that, for the first time, more forest burned than grassland and pasture: 140,000 sq km out of a total of 308,000.

In the Amazon biome alone, 179,000 square kilometres went up in flames over recent months — more than the total recorded across the whole of Brazil in 2023. Next comes the Cerrado savanna, with 97,000 sq km, while the Pantanal — the world's largest tropical wetland — saw around 19,000 sq km consumed by fire. These are unique ecosystems, both in terms of biodiversity and their capacity to store carbon dioxide.

Why the fires in the Amazon rainforest were so devastating

How do we explain a phenomenon of this scale? Especially during a period when Brazil is governed by Lula, who has made protection of the Amazon rainforest a cornerstone of his mandate — securing funding, establishing new indigenous reserves and reviving the threads of international cooperation? First and foremost, with the wave of drought that struck Brazil for months on end, the worst recorded since the 1950s, which World Weather Attribution studies have directly linked to climate change.

But the human factor also plays a role, with fires deliberately set to make way for intensive farming and livestock grazing. Indeed, sources quoted by The Guardian suggest there may have been a form of retaliation by criminal groups, with 119 federal police investigations opened in 2025 into suspected arson, compared to around 70 in previous years.

The consequences, however, could drag on for a long time to come. "Once a forest is on fire, it takes years and years to recover. If there is another drought and that forest is not protected, it will burn again," explained Ane Alencar, coordinator of MapBiomas. Restoring the soil to health would require a particularly intense rainy season — a condition that, to date, has yet to materialise.