Bolivia declared a National Emergency on Saturday due to ongoing, near-record-breaking wildfires burning throughout the country, according to the country’s defense ministry.
Wildfires burned at least 3 million hectares (7.5 million acres) throughout Bolivia so far this year, the nation’s highest hectare total since 2010, according to Brazil’s space research agency Inep. The agency recorded over 56,000 fire outbreaks between January and Sept. 8, which is 20,000 outbreaks higher than the country’s yearly average and is already the country’s third-highest annual outbreak total since 1998.
Bolivia’s wildfire season usually peaks in August and September, but officials are already preparing to continue fighting fires until the year’s end. The country saw its highest number of October, November, and December fire outbreaks ever recorded last year at 12,453, 9,426, and 1,347 outbreaks respectively.
“The head of the Ministry of Defense explained that the national emergency will allow for a more agile and rapid dynamic in the procedures with countries interested in providing support to Bolivia to mitigate the fire,” the ministry’s statement read. “At the national level, there will be active and coordinated work with the governorates, municipalities, and institutions of the central government and others that have to do with mitigating fires, as well as attention to health and humanitarian issues for the affected populations and the firefighters who are working, said the authority.”
South America’s highest wildfire activity so far this year are in Bolivia and areas of the Brazilian Amazon. Brazilian authorities also estimated 2024’s July was the worst July in two decades, with more than 22,000 active wildfires. Wildfire increases occurred around two weeks earlier than usual during fire season in the region, which historically has peaked in August and September.
Brazil’s above-average emissions are caused in part by wildfires burning across the Pantanal wetlands. The world’s largest tropical wetland and biodiversity haven has marked record-breaking wildfires this year, just four years after similar fires burned 13,300 acres of the preserve.
“We were just trying to recover from the 2020 fire, which devastated our Pantanal. We had not fully recovered and now we are facing this again,” said a volunteer firefighter with the Baia Negra Environmental Protection Area’s Association of Women Producers.
The Pantanal is the biome in Brazil that has dried up the most between 1985 and 2023. Annual water surface for the area last year was just under 944,000 acres — only 2 percent of the wetland biome was covered by water. The total is reportedly 61 percent under the historical average. The area was 50 percent drier in 2023 than it was in 2018 when the area’s last major flood happened.
READ MORE: World’s largest tropical wetland burned this year
