São Paulo, Brazil – Tormented by weeks of insufferable heat, extremely dry conditions, and widespread wildfires, Brazil’s air quality this week hit the worst levels in the world and breathing it is considered “unhealthy” and “hazardous” in many regions.
According to the Swiss company IQAir, a United Nations partner that monitors global air quality, the city of Cruzeiro do Sul, in the northern state of Acre, recorded the worst air quality in the entire world on Monday and Tuesday. Among the major cities worldwide, São Paulo had the worst air quality on these two days.
In fact, Brazil is dryer than the Sahara Desert. According to MetSul Meteorology, the phenomenon results from the combination of prolonged drought, while the desert in northern Africa is experiencing higher-than-usual humidity levels. While some areas of São Paulo reached 7% humidity, regions near the Sahara — like Cairo, Egypt — had 36% humidity.
The situation is worst in the Southwest, Central-West and the North of Brazil, where many cities are in an emergency situation in which authorities recommend people avoid outdoor activities between 10:00 AM and 4:00 PM. All of this is happening amid temperatures above 30ºC (86° F), reaching up to 45ºC (113 °F) in cities in the Central-West.
On top of the high temperatures and low humidity, Brazil is also battling wildfires in several areas, not just in the Amazon or other major biomes like the Cerrado and Pantanal. There are fires from north to south — some of them naturally occurring and others human caused. So far, 15 people have been arrested for starting fires in the State of São Paulo alone. In most cases, these are fires set to “prepare” the land for agricultural development.
The smoke from the wildfires has spread across the country, worsening air quality. Large cities like the capital Brasília and São Paulo have been shrouded in a visible layer of smoke for days. This smoke can be harmful to public health, and hospitals have already reported a 60% increase in cases of respiratory illness.
In São Paulo, the country’s largest city, from August to the first week of September, 76 people died from severe acute respiratory syndrome, and another 1,523 were diagnosed with the illness. According to pulmonologist Dr. José Branco, the link between wildfires and public health is “clear and alarming.”
“The increase in respiratory and infectious diseases in affected regions is a direct reflection of the environmental degradation caused by the wildfires. It is essential that public officials, health professionals, and the society work together to mitigate the effects of the fires,” he wrote in O Tempo.
And the weather forecast is not positive for Brazilians: an extremely hot and dry air mass covers most of the country, leading to temperatures above 40ºC (104° F) and relative humidity below 10%, according to MetSul Meteorology. These conditions, without any chance of rain, are expected to persist at least until Sunday.
Record-breaking wildfires
According to the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe), an agency that monitors deforestation and forest fires, from January 1 to September 7, 2024, 156,023 fire outbreaks were identified in the country. This is the highest number of wildfires for the period since 2010, when the country had 163,408 fire outbreaks.
In August, Inpe recorded 68,600 fire outbreaks, with 38,200 in the Amazon (120% more than in August 2023), 18,600 in the Cerrado (a 171% increase), 6,000 in the Atlantic Forest, 4,400 in the Pantanal (a 3,910% increase), and 1,200 in the Caatinga, the country’s five main biomes.
In the Amazon, the burned area is equivalent to more than 3.5 million Maracanãs, the country’s 80,000-seat soccer stadium. By August 30, 3,505,300 hectares had been burned in Brazil, according to data from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, making it the worst August since observations began in the area in the late 1990s.
Between Monday and Tuesday, Brazil accounted for 75.9% of all wildfires in South America. There were 5,132 fire outbreaks in 24 hours, most of them in the Cerrado, located in the country’s Central-West region. According to Ane Alencar, director of Inpe, the fires in 2024 were fueled by a combination of factors, including the second year of El Niño, followed by La Niña, global warming, and human action.
“In Brazil, we’ve typically seen severe droughts in the Amazon and part of the Cerrado, but affecting several biomes at the same time is one of the first times. It’s almost a perfect storm, where the climate is the engine that drives the fires resulting from the wildfires,” she said.
The situation is so serious that the federal government created a crisis task force to combat the wildfires. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva traveled to the Amazon to discuss important measures with local authorities. Meanwhile, environmental protection NGOs are demanding effective actions against criminal fires set by rural producers.
“Brazil is ablaze due to the dangerous combination of extreme weather events and human action! We know that, year after year, criminal fires consume thousands of hectares of Brazilian biomes and threaten the survival of biodiversity and all of us. But as we close out August, the data shows a dramatic and hot path of increasing fire outbreaks for the month, compared to the same period in 2023,” said Greenpeace Brazil in a statement.
According to the environmental NGO, in addition to causing harm to people living nearby, the smoke from the fires in the Amazon and Pantanal has traveled to distant regions, worsening air quality across the country.
Thais Bannwart, spokesperson for Greenpeace Brazil, said that the fires are caused by human activity and, in the face of extreme weather events, seem to become “a cheap strategy for nature’s destruction.”
“The responsible parties need to be identified and properly punished, and the inability to access funding in such situations is a measure that should be enforced by banks and regulators,” Bannwart said.