“The drought is killing the coffee plantations,” laments family farmer Gersi de Souza, a resident of Acrelândia in Acre state, one of the 3,978 Brazilian municipalities affected by the current drought. “Last year, we were already in a tough situation. And the situation has become more complicated this year,” he says. This is the worst drought in 70 years in Brazil, according to data from the National Center for Monitoring and Alerts of Natural Disasters (CEMADEN, in English) of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.
Researchers interviewed by Brasil de Fato believe that the phenomenon results from the influence of El Niño, which affected Brazil in 2023, and growing deforestation in the Amazon, which intensified during the Bolsonaro istration. “From 2019 to 2022, we lost 50,000 km² of primary forest, apart from secondary forest,” explains Luciana Gatti, coordinator of the greenhouse gas laboratory at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE, in Portuguese). Primary forests are the native forests of a biome, while secondary forests are those that have grown in a previously deforested area. “We haven’t recovered the 50,000 square kilometers of forest lost, and we haven’t zeroed out deforestation either,” she warns.
El Niño, characterized by the warming of the waters of the Pacific Ocean, has reduced rainfall in the Amazon rainforest, bringing a dry summer to the region in 2023. “We saw fish deaths, dolphins, riverine populations, and Indigenous peoples isolated and having difficulty accessing high-quality water and transportation,” says Helga Correa, a conservation specialist at the NGO WWF Brasil. In 2024, the drought in the Amazon came earlier than expected, without the biome recovering from the previous drought. “We didn’t have enough rain in the wet season, and we entered the dry season with a water deficit,” she explains.
The loss of forest reduces evapotranspiration, the sum of all processes by which water moves from the land surface to the atmosphere via evaporation and transpiration. “Every time I touch on this possibility of the forest contributing to evapotranspiration, I contribute to changing the circulation of rain and increasing the temperature in general,” says Helga.
Although the effects of the drought are most evident in the Amazon region, where populations have been isolated due to the low water level in the rivers, the impacts can be felt in more than 70% of the country’s municipalities.
“If, on the one hand, deforestation benefits some people economically, the damage to health and the damage caused by climate change are shared by everyone due to the loss of biodiversity,” says Helga.
Gatti emphasizes the urgent need for the government to implement measures to control deforestation and initiate reforestation projects to mitigate the situation. She warns, “We need more trees to moisten the atmosphere and protect us from heat waves.”
