Natural disasters quicken an already precipitous global loss of species

TROPICAL WETLANDS should be soggy and green, not lands of flaming vegetation. Yet the world’s largest tropical wetland, Brazil’s Pantanal, has been burning for weeks, in the largest blazes to take hold in the region since records there began in 1998. The consequences for one of the planet’s most diverse ecosystems are haunting. Blackened, starving jaguars wander amid the ashes, paws burnt through to the bone. They are the lucky ones. The charred remains of dead caimans, tapirs and monkeys bear testament to the less fortunate. Farther north in the Amazon, more than 20,000 fires were detected in the first two weeks of September, more than burned in the whole of September 2019.In both regions, fires are set by farmers seeking to clear wild land for agriculture, encouraged by lax government policies. Deforestation in the Amazon is drying out the entire region, making the fires worse, and stymying “flying rivers” that carry moisture evaporated off the Amazon’s treetops downwind to the Pantanal.