Why did the South American country declare a national emergency?

Bolivia declared a national emergency due to intense forest fires, the country's Defense Ministry announced on Saturday. At a press conference, Defense Minister Edmundo Novillo said the declaration would facilitate the rapid coordination of international assistance.

Bolivia declared a national emergency due to intense forest fires, as announced by the country's Defense Ministry on Saturday. At a press conference, Defense Minister Edmundo Novillo said this declaration would facilitate the rapid coordination of international assistance. Novillo pointed out that this measure would allow for faster and more effective assistance from friendly nations and international cooperation.

According to Inpe, the Brazilian space agency that tracks fires, Bolivia has experienced the highest number of wildfires since 2010 this year, with at least 3 million hectares burned. South America is currently going through its peak fire season, which spans August and September, after an unusually early fire season that began in July due to drought.

Resources to fight the fires in Bolivia are stretched, prompting the government to seek international help. Indigenous volunteers tried to protect their territories used to grow food and feed livestock near the Chiquitano forest that extends into Brazil and Paraguay, but had to be partially evacuated.

Annual forest fires in Bolivia

Brazil has also experienced significant fires in its cities, and the Amazon rainforest is experiencing its worst start in two decades following a record drought. Despite community resistance, fires have devastated indigenous territories and protected areas in the Bolivian Amazon. These fires have disrupted food sources, access to clean water, and destroyed homes. The problem goes beyond climate change and involves structural issues: national policies favor extractive economies. Communities know that fires are used as a pretext to invade their territories.

In 2019, Bolivia experienced its largest forest fires, affecting over 6,000,000 hectares in eastern Bolivia, mainly in the dry Chiquitano forest in Santa Cruz. This year saw a significant debate over the “Fire Norms Package,” a bundle of laws and regulations from 2013 to 2019 that encouraged deforestation and facilitated slash-and-burn permits. The “Fire Norms Package” is considered a major factor in the country's sunny wildfires.

In 2020, an amendment to the Beni Land Use Plan (PLUS) highlighted attempts by some sectors to legalize deforestation and change land categories to expand pastoral farming and monocultures. Since the approval of the PLUS in Beni, there has been an increase in fire outbreaks in the department.

Climate change exacerbates forest fires in Bolivia

In addition, climate change has become an undeniable reality. In October, exceptionally high temperatures were recorded in at least five departments by the National Meteorological and Hydrological Service. In October of last year, around 105 municipalities in Bolivia had declared a disaster due to insufficient rainfall. The combination of high temperatures and drought led to crop failures in indigenous communities and made forests extremely vulnerable to fires. The traditional slash-and-burn technique, once manageable, led to unprecedented fires in the provinces of Abel Iturralde and José Ballivián during this period.

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In the midst of this climate crisis, it is important to challenge national norms and policies that promote extractive economies linked to wildfires. By 2022, Bolivia was the third highest country in the world in terms of deforestation of developed primary forests. Alluvial gold mining has increased in the Bolivian Amazon, leading to deforestation through illegal activities, river course alterations, and mercury pollution.

Deforestation reaches alarming levels in Bolivia

Bolivia often receives less attention compared to Brazil, despite having significant annual forest losses. In 2022, Bolivia lost 245,177 hectares of primary forest, accounting for 12.4% of the total Amazon deforestation that year. The combined Amazon territories of Colombia and Peru, which total about 127 million hectares, account for only 12.2%, according to the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP), a network focused on monitoring deforestation in the region.

More than half of Bolivia is made up of Amazon wilderness, which extends south through the departments of Pando, Beni and Santa Cruz, covering much of the northeast of the country, as well as north of La Paz and the eastern edge of Cochabamba.

Destruction in this significant but often overlooked part of the Amazon has accelerated. Between 2002 and 2023, more than 4 million hectares of primary forest were lost – the equivalent of the size of Switzerland – as reported by Global Forest Watch. This represents a 10% reduction in primary forest area since the early 2000s.

Most recent deforestation is due largely to uncontrolled fires. These human-caused fires, designed to clear land for agriculture through a method known as “chaqueo,” often grow into large fires. Many fires are illegal and become uncontrollable, destroying large areas of forest.

Tropics lose forest cover

The tropics continue to lose primary forests at an alarming rate, with an area of ​​tree cover equivalent to half the size of Panama expected to disappear by 2023, according to data from the University of Maryland's GLAD laboratory.

Data shows that primary forest loss totaled 3.7 million hectares (9.1 million acres) last year, according to data from the Global Forest Watch (GFW) platform managed by the World Resources Institute (WRI). This represents a 9% decline from 2022, but remains almost unchanged compared to deforestation rates in 2019 and 2021. Over the past two decades, the world has consistently lost between 3 million and 4 million hectares (7.4 million to 9.9 million acres) of primary forest annually.

This trend takes the planet far from the goal of achieving zero deforestation by 2030, a global target set by 145 countries at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021.

Forest loss, particularly in regions, contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. Stopping and reversing forest loss by the end of the decade is seen as critical to meeting the Paris Agreement's goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C (2.7°F) above pre-industrial levels.