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While continuing the assault on the Amazon led by incumbent President Bolsonaro, who beheaded the environmental agency and paralyzed the indigenous agency Funai. And so, feeling protected and unpunished, farmers and cattle ranchers started to burn in the forest to expand pastures and plantations, they even called a "fire day". The result is the destruction of 1,700.8 square kilometers (657 square miles) of forest in August alone, three times that of the previous government. As promised by the president the first are unpunished: none of the 2,539 lawsuits for the fires ended with a conviction.

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After Siberia and the Amazon, also the Congo Basin is now burning. Whiles governments across the world, the United Nations and environmental conservation groups continue to pile pressure on authorities to combat the fire, records by NASA indicated that two African countries were suffering more fire outbreaks than Brazil was: 6,902 fires in Angola, compared to 3,395 in the Democratic Republic of Congo and 2,127 in Brazil.

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The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, has accused environmental groups of setting fires in the Amazon as he tries to deflect growing international criticism of his failure to protect the world’s biggest rainforest. A surge of fires in several Amazonian states this month followed reports that farmers were feeling emboldened to clear land for crop fields and cattle ranches because the new Brazilian government was keen to open up the region to economic activity. Brazil has had more than 72,000 fire outbreaks so far this year, an 84% increase on the same period in 2018, according to the country’s National Institute for Space Research. More than half of them were in the Amazon.

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Scientists say the greening effects from rising levels of carbon dioxide might be over.  The world is gradually becoming less green, scientists have found. Plant growth is declining all over the planet, and new research links the phenomenon to decreasing moisture in the air—a consequence of climate change. The study published in Science Advances points to satellite observations that revealed expanding vegetation worldwide during much of the 1980s and 1990s. But then, about 20 years ago, the trend stopped. Since then, more than half of the world’s vegetated landscapes have been experiencing a “browning” trend, or decrease in plant growth, according to the authors.

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Hundreds of wildfires are torching huge swaths of Siberia after an unusually hot and dry summer left forests primed to burn. The blazes, likely ignited by lightning and strengthened by strong winds, have already burned more than 320,000 square kilometres, an area as large as Belgium, with the vast majority in areas that are hard to reach and where potential damage is likely to be less than the cost of fighting them.

  1. Land defender violently killed by a security guard of a Canadian palm oil company in the DR Congo
  2. Tree plantation wildfires in Spain are a warning sign
  3. Eating forests
  4. Congo, intimidation of environmentalists