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Brazil: Amazon losses help drive growing wildfires elsewhere

Source(s): Thomson Reuters
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By Fabio Zuker

[...]

More than 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres) of land have burned this year in Brazil's wildlife-rich Pantanal, a tropical wetlands that normally alternates between periods of flooding and drought each year.

The increasingly severe drought behind the fires has its origins in the Amazon, said Pierre Girard, a hydro-ecologist at Brazil's Federal University of Matto Grosso, located in one of the states that contain the Pantanal.

[...]

But as the forest becomes smaller and more fragmented, it can produce less of the rain that other parts of Brazil - and Argentina - depend on.

"Burning the forest has an impact on the wetlands" - and potentially on food production in Brazil's rich southern breadbasket, Girard said.

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Hazards Drought Wildfire
Themes Environment and ecosystems
Country and region Argentina Brazil
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