(Brasilia) After unprecedented floods last month in southern Brazil, the same region and biodiversity sanctuaries like the Amazon and the Pantanal risk facing a “severe” drought, the Brazilian minister warned on Wednesday. the environment.
“After the heavy rains, we will have drought, probably in the Amazon and the Pantanal […],” Minister Marina Silva said during an official ceremony in the presence of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
The minister recalled that these episodes of drought are often accompanied by “terrible forest fires”.
She also spoke of an ongoing “severe drought” in the semi-arid Caatinga region in northeast Brazil, and coming in the south of the country, hit by floods that have killed more than 170 people.
These extreme weather events are due to the “combination of weather phenomena like El Niño and the intensification of climate change,” assured Ms. Silva.
On the occasion of World Environment Day, President Lula signed 14 decrees aimed at strengthening environmental protection in Brazil.
One of them consists of an agreement between the federal government and the states which shelter the Amazon and the Pantanal, the largest wetland on the planet, for a common policy for the prevention and control of forest fires.
Marina Silva took over the reins of the ministry in January 2023 where she had already officiated during a large part of Lula’s first two mandates (2003-2010).
During the first year of the left-wing president’s third term (2023), deforestation was halved in the Amazon, after having increased sharply under his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro.
But it increased by more than 43% in the Cerrado, a biodiverse savannah located south of the Amazon.
Marina Silva, however, announced on Wednesday the beginning of an “inflection”, deforestation in the Cerrado having, according to her, fallen by 12.9% from January to May compared to the same period last year.