Brazil has increased wildfire spending and has hired a record number of federal firefighters in anticipation of extreme drought in the Amazon due to what could be one of the strongest El Niño events in more than a century.
The El Niño climate pattern, which emerges from unusually warm waters in the tropical Pacific, typically brings hotter, drier conditions to large parts of the Amazon. This raises the risk of severe drought and large wildfires. With a ‘strong’ to ‘very strong’ El Niño predicted this year, the impacts on the world’s largest rainforest are also expected to be more extreme.
“I’m not calm. I’m very alert,” João Paulo Sotero, director of deforestation and fire policy at Brazil’s environment ministry, told Mongabay in a video interview. “We are much better prepared 1783361406 than we were in 2024 and 2025 … we are prepared for the worst scenario.”
Sotero said Brazil has increased funding for fire management in 2026 to 1.023 billion reais ($197 million), up 28% from 2025, or 24% after adjusting for inflation, rising after pro–deforestation president Jair Bolsonaro left office at the end of 2022. The budget is now five times larger than it was in 2019.
The environment ministry also hired 4,410 additional federal firefighters for the 2026 fire season. In 2024, 3,224 firefighters were hired, while 4,358 firefighters were hired in 2025.
According to Sotero, his team has identified high-risk locations in the Amazon to focus efforts, including a new deforestation frontier in the south of Amazon state, and around the Gurupi Biological Reserve in Maranhão state. He said they have also increased the number of water-bearing planes and helicopters available for firefighting.
The 2023-24 El Niño event pushed several Amazonian rivers to an all-time low level, killing dolphins and cutting off communities that depend on river traffic. It also fueled 2024’s worst Amazon fire season in 20 years.
A stronger El Niño could bring a similarly severe, or worse, drought, with the most intense effects expected between September and January, said Carlos Nobre, the climate scientist behind the Amazon tipping point theory.
“We have to fight the fires,” Nobre told Mongabay by phone, adding that 98% of fires in the Amazon are set by humans, not electrical discharges from lightning or power lines. “The risk posed by fires is so great today that we should have policies prohibiting, for example, the financial system from financing agricultural operations that use fire.”
Brazil’s Environment Ministry said it has discussed financial incentives to link access to agricultural finance to the non-use of fire, but no such measures have been adopted. Officials also said that fire restrictions during El Niño will be up to individual states, adding that firefighters use controlled burns to reduce wildfire risks.
Banner image: Residents fight a forest fire in Acre, Brazil in September 2025. Image courtesy of Victor Moriyama/Climate Visuals.
Source:
news.mongabay.com