In Brazil’s rainforests, the worst fires are likely still to come

The number of fires in the Amazon rainforest this year is the highest since 2010, reaching more than 90,000 active blazes. Farmers and ranchers routinely use fire to clear their land in the dry season, but this year’s numbers reflect a worrisome uptick in the rate of deforestation, which dropped around 2005 before rebounding earlier this decade.

Many people blame the Brazilian government and its pro-agriculture policies for the current crisis. But as an environmental researcher who has worked in the Amazon for the past 25 years, I can say the seeds were planted before the election of President Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. And the prospects of slowing deforestation remain dim, an issue that matters to people around the world.

That’s in part because the current administration has only aggravated the situation with its anti-environmental agenda. Unless the Brazilian people succeed in making Bolsonaro retreat from his stated goal of “developing” the Amazon, deforestation will rear its ugly head once more. Adding fuel to the fire is the quickening pace of the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA), a multinational plan to build roads, dams and rail lines across the rainforest.

Conflicting objectives

Brazil managed to significantly reduce deforestation rates at the turn of the millennium with effective environmental policy and voluntary efforts by the private sector. Deforestation, which began in the 1970s, rose again in 2015 as a result of political turmoil and an economic recession that paved the way for policy reversals.

The Amazonian deforestation rate dropped from about 27,700...