Brazil is burning: is worse yet to come?

Watch the footage filmed by a Story Productions team in Mato Grosso, including on-the-ground footage
as well as drone shots. To see more of the material and discuss licensing, get in touch

Brazil’s government signed a decree yesterday banning the use of fires to clear land in the Amazon and across the rest of the country for a period of 60 days. According to Brazil’s space agency, INPE, there have been more than 83,000 fires so far this year (a 77% rise on the same period last year) and they’ve been making headlines around the world for the past fortnight.

Could the Brazilian government’s ban be too little action and too late? A leading Brazilian environmentalist has been quoted across a number of news outlets both in Brazil and abroad saying that the worst is yet to come. Tasso Azevedo, of deforestation monitoring group Mapbiomas, explained that the current fires are in patches of forest that had been cleared in April, May and June and left to dry. He goes on to explain that the forest that was cleared in July and August ( at a rate much higher than previous months) was a source of combustible fuel at risk of being ignited.

Dr Erika Berenguer, a Senior Research Associate at the Ecosystems Lab at Oxford University, explains that there are two types of fire in the Amazon; those used to clear existing pasture and those used to clear forest, and that the fires sweeping the region in the past weeks are the latter. “What’s most alarming in all this is that we’re still at the start of the dry season. In October, when we reach the peak of the dry period in Pará, the likelihood unfortunately is that the situation will be much worse,” Berenguer warns.

Story Productions has years of experience filming in the Amazon, for clients that range from documentary makers to news corporations and reality TV producers. A Story crew was on the ground last weekend, filming protests in São Paulo against the lack of government response to the fires. We’ve also been at the front line with fire fighters in Mato Grosso, in the Chapada dos Guimarães National Park, near the transition zone between Amazon and cerrado shrubland. Get in touch if you’re interested in licensing this footage.