The world’s news media are focused on the fires engulfing the Amazon, but evidence visible from space shows that there are five times more fires burning in Central Africa than in the South American rainforest.
The Amazon wildfires affect mostly Brazil and Bolivia, but satellite images from Aug. 22 and Aug. 23 show that the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola experienced more fires in that 48-hour period, according to NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer satellite imagery.
Analysis of the data by U.S.-based weather technology firm Weather Source showed 6,902 fires in Angola and 3,395 in the Democratic Republic of Congo over the two days compared to 2,127 fires in Brazil, Bloomberg reported.
Zambia ranked fourth on the list of the most fires seen from space during the same period with 1,000 visible fires, while Brazil’s neighbor in the Amazon, Bolivia, placed sixth with 655.
In mid-August, Brazilian farmers in the Amazonian state of Pará set forests aflame to clear land for planting.
Those forest fires spread rapidly, ripping through the Amazon, an ecosystem on which the whole world depends. Known as “the lungs of the Earth”, the South American rainforest removes planet-warming greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and replaces them with vital oxygen. Simply put, without the Amazon, global warming speeds up.
Fires in Central Africa are a common agricultural practice as farmers often set fires to clear land for crops.
In June 2018, the Aqua satellite discovered more than 67,000 fires in a one-week period in Central Africa, according to NASA.
Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 65: Tunde Ogunlana
Part 2: Jamarlin continues his talk with Tunde Ogunlana, the CEO of Axial Family Advisors, a wealth planning firm. They discuss how QE or quantitative easing (money printing) is likely to look different in the next financial crisis in America and some tax benefits with side hustles. They also discuss why estate planning is a selfless act.
While the wildfires burning in Central Africa are mostly confined to the savanna — widely-spaced trees and grassland — they could threaten the Congo Basin, which is the second-largest rainforest in the world, Bigthink reports.
The forest in the Congo Basin amounts to around 500 million acres and supports more than 2,000 species of animals and 10,000 species of plants.
