RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – As global attention turns to the Amazon rainforest, massive fires are devouring sub-Saharan African vegetation, too.
The flames that have been raging in the Amazon since the start of summer have led to international criticism of Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro‘s controversial environmental policies. But across the Atlantic, forests on another continent are being even more severely affected by fires.
Satellite monitoring system images of forest fires are impressive. They show that fire outbreaks are most numerous in sub-Saharan Africa, Angola, Zambia, the Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Madagascar.
Between Thursday, August 22nd, and Friday, August 23rd, nearly 7,000 fires were detected in Congo forests alone, compared to 2,000 in Brazil over the same period, according to Weather Source figures compiled by Bloomberg.
African fires are believed to account for 25 to 35 percent of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, according to a note from the European Space Agency (ESA).
Potential G7 support
Why do these fires mobilize the international community less than those in the Amazon? This may be related to the fact that the phenomenon, although dreadful, is less related to climate change and drought than to local people’s farming practices.
According to NASA’s latest report, sub-Saharan Africa “represents approximately seventy percent of the world’s burnt area.” The US Space Agency explains that farmers in these regions use fire to clear their land, regenerate pastures and burn debris from cultivated land to prepare for the next harvest season. This technique costs farmers almost nothing and is called “slash and burn” or slash-and-burn farming. When poorly controlled, this practice may easily result in huge fires while flames are fuelled by strong winds.
Emmanuel Macron mentioned these fires at a press conference at the G7 summit in Biarritz on Monday: “We are currently examining the possibility of launching [in Africa] an initiative similar to what we have just announced for the Amazon.”
According to the World Resources Institute, the Democratic Republic of Congo is, second only to Brazil, the country that has lost the most area of primary tropical forests in 2018.
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