The world's largest tropical wetland is ablaze like never before.
Almost a quarter of the Pantanal has gone up in flames.
For months, we've been witnessing how fires are ravaging this precious ecosystem.
But what exactly is going on here?
Unfortunately, it's bad news.
These flames are just the warning lights of a much bigger underlying threat.
Located in South America, in the center of the Upper Paraguay River Basin,
the Brazilian part of the Pantanal spreads over nearly 150,000 sqm.
Wetlands like this provide irreplaceable ecosystems
and have been described as biological supermarkets.
And they have also been named the kidneys of the landscape,
gushing fresh groundwater into tributaries
and enriching the land with nutrients.
They help prevent floods and droughts
and stabilize the climate by storing carbon in the soil
and keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
The Pantanal is one of the most biologically diverse habitats on the planet.
Around 2,000 plant species and 1,200 vertebrate animal species live here,
including the highest concentration of jaguars on the planet.
These elusive creatures live alongside giant otters...
caimans and capybaras...
and the hyacinth macaw, the largest flying parrot in the world.
All life in the Pantanal is determined by the flood pulse,
the beating heart of this wetland.
During the wet season from November to March,
rainfall in the headwaters of the Pantanal drains down more than a 1000 rivers
to fill the vast floodplain.
The area acts like a dry sponge:
it soaks up all the incoming fresh water with its nutrients and fish
and prevents flooding in areas downstream.
When the dry season comes, lasting from April to October,
the floodplain is like a saturated sponge,
slowly squeezing out the water which soaked up in the preceding months
and supplying the area with moisture long after the rains have gone.
But this year, things were drastically different.
The floodplain never flooded.
The Pantanal is now facing its biggest drought in five decades.
But how can this happen to an area that normally contains water in abundance?
The obvious answer is: These are the effects of climate change.
And yes, scientific models have predicted a much hotter Pantanal,
alternating between severe drought and extreme rainfall.
But that's only half the truth.
Human encroachment worsens the situation dramatically,
both outside and inside the Pantanal.
To the north of the Pantanal, the Amazon continues to shrink due to deforestation.
The rainforest's flora evaporates moisture into the air,
some of which comes down as rainfall over the Pantanal.
But that essential water source disappears with the trees in the Amazon.
With severe negative consequences for the wetland.
Between October 2019 and March 2020,
the rainfall volume was 40% less than the average for this six month period.
In the upper Paraguay River basin,
water sources are suffering from another form of human expansion.
More and more small hydroelectric dams are being built
on the rivers and streams that make up the Pantanal.
There have only been a few investigations into these dams,
but all the reports show similar results.
The dams affect the flood pulse and make drought waves more likely.
In the Pantanal itself, fires have triggered an inferno,
the likes of which has never been seen before.
More than 22% of the wetland has gone up in flames since January.
Fire isn't new to the Pantanal.
For centuries, farmers have routinely set fire to the vegetation
as a cheap way to return nutrients to the soil for their next cultivation.
Ranchers also renew pasture for their beef cattle.
Ecologists emphasize that many do so sustainably.
But in the past few years, the Pantanal has faced a dramatic change in land use,
accompanied by uncontrollable fires.
A total of 93% of the Pantanal is privately owned.
New farmers are moving in,
often with little understanding of how to use fire properly.
Cattle farming in the highlands has also put pressure on local farmers
to increase the size of their herds,
using more land as they do so.
These fires were initially started in the grasslands.
But this year the natural water barrier is missing.
And so the blazes have spread to savannas, woodland and forest,
burning through the Pantanal's ecosystem.
Let's have a look at some interesting maps.
This is how the fires evolved in 2019.
And this is the evolution of more than 17,000 fires recorded this year so far.
A plus a 46%.
Now, let's compare a map of the Pantanal's cattle ranchers with the fires.
This map shows the current density of cattle ranchers in the Pantanal,
in the highlands and alongside the floodplain.
Remarkably often, new fire zones expand into areas of the floodplain
that were previously nearly untouched.
And with them, so do the cattle.
Approximately 3000 ranches are located on the Brazilian side,
with cattle herds totalling an estimated 3.8 million heads,
producing one million cows each year.
Cattle ranching and agriculture are strongly supported by the government.
Brazil is the leading nation in beef exports worldwide.
A country with more cows than people.
But the price of more pasture and farmland is high.
The loss of wetland leads to an increasing simplification of the landscape.
It lowers biodiversity and severely weakens the ecosystem.
The expansion of agriculture and cattle ranching also causes deforestation.
Without trees, the land is exposed to increasing erosion.
Most elevated areas have sandy soil
that is easily blown or washed away by rain.
These changes damage the ecosystem
and reduce its life sustaining services to an alarming level.
Is this the future of the Pantanal?
More than half of the world's original wetlands have already been lost forever,
and many others have declined to only a fraction of their original size.
If climate change, non-sustainable land management
and anti-environmental politics persist,
the Pantanal could transform from a wetland into an unknown type of ecosystem.
Thank you for watching the third part of our wildfire series.
To learn more about the situation in California, check out our video.
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