Good morning! Today, we talk about how the Pantanal wetlands are losing their water. And the state of key mayoral races.
☕ If you like our work and want to give us an extra boost, you can fill up our reporters’ coffee mugs. Supporters get exclusive perks! Find out more.
The Pantanal is losing water
The monitoring platform MapBiomas this morning published a study showing that the Pantanal — the world’s largest tropical wetland — has lost a whopping 80 percent of its water surface area since 1985. Proportionally speaking, no other biome lost as much water surface.
State of play. In 2023, water covered 18.3 million hectares of Brazil — or 2 percent of the national territory. Although that corresponds to an area twice the size of Portugal, it was a 1.5 percent decrease from Brazil’s historical average.
- There was a loss of water every month of 2023 compared to 2022, including the months of the rainy season. The last time a reduction in water surface area was recorded in Brazil was in 2021, when it fell 7 percent below the average.
👉 Why it matters. In 2020, the Pantanal saw roughly a quarter of its land scorched by...