User:Oceanflynn/sandbox/2019 Bolivia wildfires

NYT: According to an August 25, New York Times article, wildfires in Bolivia's Chiquitano dry forests "have been far larger, and more widespread, than in previous seasons". These forests are located in eastern Bolivia and in east of the Andes and in the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso and Rondônia. They are Tropical and subtropical dry broadleaf forests of the Amazon biome in eastern Bolivia and in the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso and RondôniaBrazil.

Throughout August, wildfires "have been spreading across four states."

Jaguars, tapirs, and dozens of endangered species are threatened.

By August 24, the fires which had already destroyed 2,500,000 acre of forestland in the Santa Cruz, which is twice as much as on August 18, and were were closer to Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

At first President Evo Morales ignored the fires. Juan Quintana, the president’s chief of staff, had initially said they did not require "foreign firefighting aid".

In the week of August 18, Morales "dispatched soldiers and three helicopters to fight fires in an area the size of Oregon". Since about August 21, Morales contracted the Boeing 747 Supertanker—the largest firefighting aircraft in the world—from the United States to fight the fires.

About 87 percent of the wildfires were illegally set by farmers, according to Bolivia’s land management authority. They said that "deforestation jumped 200 percent since the government quadrupled the permitted deforestation area for small farmers in 2015. The land authority attributed the increase on lax environmental enforcement."

Citing Probioma's Miguel Crespo, "It may take up to 200 years for the forests in Bolivia to heal. I’ve never seen an environmental tragedy on this scale...The government has detonated an environmental disaster. In large part, this tragedy is the result of the state’s populism and development vision based on agribusiness."

The Bolivian Amazon rainforest
Bolivia has 7.7 percent of the Amazon rainforest within its borders, compared to Brazil with 58.4%. Seven other countries share the Amazon basin. The Amazon rainforest in Bolivia covers 19,402,388 ha which represents 37.7 percent of Bolivia's forests and 17.7 percent of Bolivia's land mass. Bolivia's forest cover a total of 51,407,000 ha and include the Chiquitano dry forests,

Chiquitano dry forests
From August 18 to August 23, approximately 800,000 ha hectares of the unique Chiquitano dry forests were destroyed. That’s more forest than is usually destroyed across the country in two years." The Conversation: August 23, 2019

In 2013, the Chiquitano forest covered 8,645,849 ha representing 16.8 percent of Bolivia's forest and 7.9 percent of Bolivia's land mass.

7.9 Earth Observatory August 23, 2019

Reuters August 22