The Amazon remains a significant source of CO2 emissions, driven in part by fires that routinely affect Brazil’s vast biomes. In the first seven months of this year, fires scorched a total area of vegetation roughly 29,330 square kilometers, a swath about the size of Belgium, according to Mapbiomas, a network that maps fire scars across the country with NGO, university, and tech company collaboration.
Mapbiomas notes that the total area burned from January through July this year is 2% smaller than the same period in 2021, reflecting a reduction in damage to key ecosystems such as the Pantanal and the Atlantic Forest. The initiative underscores the ongoing efforts of partners including international environmental groups and research institutions to monitor and understand fire dynamics across Brazil.
In the Amazon, the burned area rose by 7% to around 14,800 square kilometers, a region roughly equivalent to the combined size of Asturias and Cantabria. This surge heightens concern about the world’s largest tropical forest amid accelerating deforestation pressures and climate stress, reports from Efe indicate.
Mapbiomas confirms that about 16% of fires this year in the Amazon occurred within dense tropical forest areas that should enjoy heightened protection, highlighting the challenges of safeguarding vulnerable habitats even as monitoring improves.
Research shows that three of every four hectares burned this year in Brazil involve native vegetation, with most damage occurring in natural areas rather than productive landscapes.
The study also flags the Pampa, a southern biome shared with Argentina and Uruguay, as experiencing the most notable recent fire impact, marking a dramatic 3,372% increase from the prior year. The seven-month burned area in the Pampa reached 286 square kilometers, a size comparable to the Maldives in geographic scale.
By contrast, the Pantanal saw a decline of 19% in fire area during the first seven months, totaling about 760 square kilometers—the lowest rate observed in four years. The Atlantic Forest also showed a notable decrease, reporting up to 143 square kilometers burned, a 19% reduction in the period. The Cerrado, Brazil’s expansive savanna, saw a 9% decline to 12,504 square kilometers, though this figure remains 39% higher than the same period in 2020 and 5% above the first seven months of 2019.
These figures come from the Fire Monitor, a new version of MapBiomas’ platform that focuses on quantifying the area actually destroyed by fires across different ecosystems. The project stands as a more precise instrument for assessing fire scars than traditional monthly hotspot reports, offering a clearer picture of progressive ecosystem loss.
Whereas INPE, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, releases monthly data on hotspot occurrences to support fire-fighting efforts, MapBiomas provides a cross-ecosystem X-ray of fire scars. This deeper insight helps researchers track cumulative damage and compare trends across Brazil’s diverse biomes. The platform achieves this by integrating high-resolution imagery from the European Sentinel-2 satellite, which revisits the same locations more frequently than other satellites used in prior analyses.
In sum, the ongoing monitoring of forest fires in Brazil reveals a mixed story: some ecosystems show improvement in protection and reduced burn areas, while others, notably the Amazon, continue to experience significant losses. The Fire Monitor framework emphasizes the landscape-wide perspective needed to understand how drought, land use change, and policy shifts influence fire regimes—and ultimately, the health of Brazil’s forests and the global climate. Citations: MapBiomas collaboration network, WWF, and associated researchers, with data also informed by INPE observations.