More than a thousand Brazilian municipalities are on alert Thursday, due to very low humidity, sometimes comparable to that of deserts like the Sahara, at a time when the country is facing a historic drought and a series of fires.
The affected areas are concentrated mainly in the central region of the country, particularly in Brasilia, and in the southeast, in the highly populated states of Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais.
They have a humidity level of less than 12%, below the threshold recommended by the World Health Organization, according to data published by the National Institute of Meteorology Inmet.
A “very dangerous” situation, according to this public body, because it represents “a great risk of forest fires”, but also “for health”, exposing residents in particular to “pulmonary diseases” or “headaches”.
In several dozen municipalities, the humidity level has fallen below the 10% threshold, even reaching 7%.
A level “as low” as in the Sahara, Ana Paula Cunha, a researcher at the National Center for Monitoring Natural Disasters (Cemaden), told AFP.
According to her, Brazil is experiencing its worst drought “in at least 70 years”, due to “the lack of rainfall accumulated” since the end of last year.
The country has been ravaged for months by a wave of large-scale fires in the Amazon (north), the largest tropical forest on the planet, in the Pantanal (central-west), and more recently in the state of Sao Paulo (southeast).
Huge clouds of smoke from the fires have blanketed major cities such as the capital Brasilia, where it has not rained for 130 days.
The combination of high temperatures, strong winds and low humidity creates a “very favorable context for new fires,” Brazil’s Environment Minister Marina Silva warned in a recent interview with AFP.
Only two of the 27 territories that make up Brazil “are not seriously affected by severe water shortages,” she said.
During a Senate hearing on Wednesday, she warned that the Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland and a biodiversity sanctuary, could disappear “by the end of the century” if the drought persists and these climatic phenomena “are increasingly serious and frequent.”
