Bolivia declared a national emergency due to intense forest fires, as announced by the country’s defense ministry on Saturday. During a press conference, Defense Minister Edmundo Novillo explained that this declaration would facilitate the rapid coordination of international support. Novillo indicated that this measure would enable more agile and effective assistance from friendly nations and international cooperation.
According to Inpe, Brazil’s space research agency that tracks fires, Bolivia has experienced the highest number of wildfires since 2010, with at least 3 million hectares (7.5 million acres) burned this year. South America is currently undergoing its peak fire season, which spans August and September, following an unusually early fire season that began in July due to a drought.
Bolivia’s firefighting resources are overstretched, prompting the government to seek international aid. Indigenous volunteers attempted to protect their lands, used for growing crops and feeding livestock near the Chiquitano forest extending towards Brazil and Paraguay, but some had to evacuate.
Bolivia’s annual forest fires
Brazil has also faced significant fires in its cities, and the Amazon rainforest is experiencing its worst start in two decades after a record drought. Despite community resistance, fires have ravaged Indigenous territories and protected areas in the Bolivian Amazon. These fires have disrupted food sources, access to clean water, and destroyed homes. The problem extends beyond climate change to structural issues: national policies favor extractive economies. Communities are aware that fires will be used as a pretext to encroach on their lands.
In 2019, Bolivia experienced its largest forest fires on record, impacting over 6,000,000 hectares in the Bolivian east, primarily in the Chiquitano dry forest of Santa Cruz. That year, there was significant debate over the “incendiary norms package,” a set of laws and decrees from 2013 to 2019 promoting deforestation and easing slash-and-burn agriculture permits. The “incendiary norms package” is considered a key factor in the country’s annual forest fires.
In 2020, changes to the Beni Land Use Plan (PLUS) highlighted efforts by certain sectors to legalize deforestation and alter land categories to expand livestock and monoculture farming. Since the PLUS approval in Beni, there has been an increase in hotspots in the department.
Climate change compounding Bolivia forest fires
Additionally, climate change has become an undeniable reality. In October, exceptionally high temperatures were recorded by the National Meteorology and Hydrology Service in at least five departments. By October of last year, around 105 municipalities in Bolivia had declared a disaster due to insufficient rainfall. The combination of high temperatures and drought led to the loss of agricultural crops in Indigenous communities and made forests highly susceptible to fire. The traditional slash-and-burn technique, once manageable, resulted in unprecedented fires in the Abel Iturralde and José Ballivián provinces during this period.
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Amid this climate crisis, it is crucial to question national norms and policies that promote extractive economies linked to forest fires. By 2022, Bolivia was the third-highest country in tropical primary forest deforestation globally. Alluvial gold mining has surged in the Bolivian Amazon, leading to deforestation through illegal activities, river course alterations, and mercury pollution.
Deforestation reaching alarming levels in Bolivia
Bolivia often receives less attention compared to Brazil despite having significant annual forest loss. In 2022, Bolivia lost 245,177 hectares of primary forest, making up 12.4% of the Amazon’s total deforestation that year. The combined Amazon territories of Colombia and Peru, totaling around 127 million hectares, accounted for just 12.2%, according to the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP), a network focused on tracking deforestation in the region.
Over half of Bolivia consists of Amazon wilderness, extending south through the Pando, Beni, and Santa Cruz departments, and covering much of the country’s northeastern area. It also reaches into the northern part of La Paz and the eastern edge of Cochabamba.
The destruction in this crucial yet often overlooked part of the Amazon has accelerated significantly. Between 2002 and 2023, over 4 million hectares of primary forest—equivalent to Switzerland’s size—were lost, as reported by Global Forest Watch. This represents a 10% reduction in primary forest cover since the start of the 2000s.
Recent deforestation is largely due to uncontrolled fires. These human-caused fires, intended to clear land for agriculture through a practice known as “chaqueo,” often grow into massive blazes. Many fires are illegal and become uncontrollable, destroying large areas of forest.
Tropics loosing forest cover
The tropics are continuing to lose primary forest at a troubling rate, with an area of tree cover equivalent to half the size of Panama vanishing in 2023, according to data from the University of Maryland’s GLAD lab.
The data reveals that primary forest loss last year totaled 3.7 million hectares (9.1 million acres), as reported on the Global Forest Watch (GFW) platform managed by the World Resources Institute (WRI). This represents a 9% decrease from 2022, yet it remains almost unchanged from the deforestation rates of 2019 and 2021. Over the past two decades, the world has consistently lost between 3 million and 4 million hectares (7.4 million to 9.9 million acres) of tropical forest each year.
This trend places the planet far from the goal of achieving zero deforestation by 2030, a global target established by 145 countries at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021.
The loss of forests, particularly in tropical regions, contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. Stopping and reversing forest loss by the end of the decade is deemed crucial for meeting the Paris Agreement’s objective of limiting the global average temperature rise to 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.
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