Credit, Marizilda Cruppe/Rede Amazônia Sustentável
Erika Berenguer is hoarse. The constant coughing throughout the interview comes from inspiring the combustion of the forest that has driven her career as a biologist since an early age.
As a little girl, she discovered the Amazon through books about French explorer Jacques Cousteau's expeditions, leafing through images of tapirs, anteaters, pink dolphins and other strange animals that enchanted her — and established the region in her future horizon.
"I always knew I would work in the Amazon", says the Rio native based in Oxford, in the United Kingdom, who spends long periods of time doing field work every year in Baixo Tapajós, in Pará.
Berenguer, 43 years old, is a researcher at the universities of Oxford and Lancaster and one of the coordinators of the Sustainable Amazon Network, an organization that brings together researchers and institutions from Brazil and abroad.
At the end of October, smoke darkened the sky when she landed in Santarém, Pará. It was the week after the second round and the re-election of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT).
Throughout that month, the 140% jump in fires in the Amazon compared to October 2025 had generated commotion, protests, and had been incorporated as an issue in the presidential race.
It is the same Amazon that hosted the United Nations Climate Summit in Belém last year — which is now being held, until November 20, in Antalya, Turkey, home of COP31.
This is the third El Niño whose effects Berenguer has monitored in the region, after those of 2015 and 2023. The climate phenomenon began to establish itself in June and could worsen in the coming months. It tends to increase temperatures and droughts in the Amazon, providing fuel for fires. Although forest fires are becoming more frequent, it doesn't make her feel any more "thick-skinned".
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"Every time you see the forest burning, as someone who has dedicated their career to working with it... It's like a part of your identity burns with it," says Berenguer.
"It gives a very deep sadness, like losing a part of your own being, seeing it being destroyed. It also gives a feeling of impotence for generating so much data, giving so many interviews, having so many meetings with decision makers, and still seeing the forest burning."
However, she knows the importance of not stopping — because, she warns, "the future will be worse." As climate change increases, scientists predict that the forest will become drier and more flammable.
"It's not about hope. It's about action, hands-on work and continuous investment", he argues.
Race to get there before the fire
For 16 years, Berenguer and other researchers have monitored around 30 areas within the Tapajós National Forest (Flona Tapajós), housed in a research base in the municipality of Belterra, near Santarém. Since arriving, the biologist has been in a race against time to reach these areas before the fire.
"We are trying to measure the areas we research before they burn, to be able to compare before and after," she explains, who spoke to BBC News Brasil via video call from the research base, where she will stay until Christmas.
Berenguer says that the effects of this Super El Niño, at least for now, are not yet as serious as the fires that followed the phenomenon in 2023/2024 and 2015/2016.
Credit, Personal file
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This time, she praises the contingent of firefighters and volunteers from traditional communities working to fight fires. The federal government plans to mobilize 4,410 firefighters from the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama) and the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio) to respond to the impacts of El Niño.
"The investment made this year was a record, but it is still far short of what we need to prevent the Amazon from continuing to burn with each extreme drought", considers the biologist.
For her, it is essential that fire no longer be seen as an emergency.
“We need to prepare the team for the Anthropocene, the Pyrocene, the age of fire,” he says.
"It's not every year that everything will burn and that God will help us. But we need continuous investment in preparing teams, equipment and structures to deal with fires. Because they are increasingly stronger and more frequent."
The more deforestation, the more fire
In October, the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) detected 12,457 fires in Pará, the highest number for that month since the beginning of the historical series in 1998. It was the state most affected by fires in the country.
Amid the presidential race, Lula's opponents blamed his government for the increase in fires in the Amazon. But, according to Berenguer, fires have been increasing mainly because of climate change and forest degradation, and are gaining even more strength with El Niño, which in 2024 caused a record number of forest fires in the region.
The effects of the current El Niño are still ongoing and could worsen, but Berenguer says the fires would be much worse if deforestation and forest degradation had followed the increasing course of the government of former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL).
According to data from Inpe, the deforestation rate in the Legal Amazon increased in the first three years of the Bolsonaro government (+34% in 2019; +7% in 2020; + 20% in 2021) and decreased in the last (-11%), in 2022. Since then, it has been decreasing year after year.
In the month of the last presidential elections, Inpe announced that the Amazon had its lowest deforestation rate since 1988: between August 2025 and July 2026, 3,335 square kilometers were deforested, 41.8% less than the previous year.
"From the last year of the Bolsonaro government to this last year of the Lula government, there was a drop of more than 70% in deforestation rates. And the more deforestation, the more fires in the region", he explains.
"If we hadn't had the lowest deforestation rate in the country's history this past year, the situation in the Amazon would be much worse than it is."
At the opening of COP31, on Wednesday (11/11), Lula reaffirmed the Brazilian government's commitment to ending deforestation and again called for international cooperation to preserve the Amazon.
"The collaboration of partner countries shows that global action can have an important local impact", he stated.
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'The Amazon historically doesn't burn'
The criminal or politically motivated use of fire is part of the problem. But there would have to be "too many arsonists" to account for more than 12,000 fires in Pará, says the scientist.
Berenguer highlights that, in the Amazon, fire is widely used in rural areas for soil management, but this tradition is getting out of control.
"The problem is that more and more of this fire — whether from fields, pastures, or deforested areas — is able to escape into the forest", explains Berenguer.
That didn't happen in the past.
"The Amazon is a biome that historically doesn't burn. It didn't evolve with fire, because it's humid. Local [residents] say that the forest was a natural firebreak. It was so humid that it blocked the fire. When it arrived, it couldn't spread," says Berenguer.
"With climate change, this natural firebreak has ceased to exist."
A firebreak is a weeded strip of land around forests or pastures to prevent the spread of fire. In the Amazon, however, this barrier was not imposed by areas free of vegetation, but rather by the dense "carpet" of the forest: the litter. The layer of organic matter that covers the forest floor protects soil moisture, shelters its macrofauna (the small invertebrates that live in the soil, such as earthworms, ants and termites) and recycles nutrients.
However, the combination of a series of factors is causing the litter to dry out — such as forest degradation, which opens up gaps for the sun and wind to enter; the warming generated by climate change; and the reduction of rainfall around large deforested areas. And El Niño worsens the situation, bringing more heat and drought to the Amazon.
Thus, the litter has stopped being a protective barrier, and has started to act as a fuel that penetrates the forest.
"The forest was very humid, but it is no longer so. In years of extreme drought, the fire reaches the forest and can continue to spread."
'Irremediable loss'
At Flona Tapajós — a conservation unit created in 1974, when BR-163 was opened — the group of researchers monitors areas at different stages of conservation.
Some have already experienced multiple fires; others have already had selective logging; and others are forests that have never had disturbances caused by humans. Even these are succumbing to fires.
Where a layman sees a burnt forest, Berenguer sees many layers beyond: he knows about the amount of greenhouse gases being emitted, the countless ecological functions and processes eroded in the fire, the irremediable loss of biodiversity.
Ultimately, he views the future with concern — which will be different "from what we imagine this great Amazon Forest to be like."
“Our studies show that, even 30 years after the fires, forests have 25% less carbon stock and a significantly different biodiversity,” he says.
"Amazonian trees grow very slowly. There are species that took 800 years to reach 30 cm in circumference. So, we are talking about a process of hundreds of years for recovery. That is if there were no other disturbances."
"For example, without the interference of climate change. Which is impossible."
A desolate silence follows, echoing these hundreds of years, this scenario of a path of no return.
But then, she highlights: this modified forest is much better than nothing.
"Even these extremely degraded forests that we have been measuring for almost 20 years still have much more conservation value — that is, to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss — than areas without forests, such as pastures and agricultural fields", he points out.
She remembers a 2021 survey indicating that, for 83% of Brazilians, the Amazon is part of their national identity. The survey was carried out by PoderData at the request of Instituto Clima e Sociedade.
Still, in the biologist's opinion, the region seems like a distant reality to those who don't live there — but it affects life in the rest of Brazil, with an impact on rainfall, agricultural productivity and food prices.
"We still fail to connect what happens in the Amazon with what happens in the rest of the country, and how this directly affects our health and our pockets", says Berenguer.
* Mariana Alvim, from BBC News Brasil in São Paulo, collaborated
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