Attachments
Authors: Simon Schütze and Yvonne Walz
1. Event
In 2020 the Amazon rainforest, one of the largest, most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth, was again ravaged by fires (Voiland, 2021). Although the Amazon rainforest experiences human-made fires on a yearly basis, coinciding drought conditions in 2020 turned them into the worst wildfires since measurements began, in 1998 (Woodwell Climate Research Center, 2020). In terms of area burned, the fires of 2020 were the largest since 2010 (INPE, 2021). Most of the over-2,500 individual fire events occurred in the Brazilian Amazon (88 per cent), followed by the Bolivian Amazon (8 per cent) and the Peruvian Amazon (4 per cent) (MAAP, 2020). Despite its geographical location (see Figure 1), the Amazon fires have larger-scale global impacts, interfering with climate and weather patterns, and the conservation of ecosystems for the provision of services associated with medicine, agriculture, and other key industries essential for the survival of humanity (Müller, 2020).