The unprecedented fire season has raged through one of the hot dots of the earth's biodiversity

With ecosystems ranging from Andean highlands to the vast plains to the Amazon tropical forest, Colombia – perceived at the junction of Central and South America – is home to almost 10% of world biodiversity. Its emblematic species include dozens in the genus Espelette: Plants of Seissian appearance commonly called Frailejones, or “big monks”. Their rosettes of succulent and hairy leaves rise on thick and spongy trunks which trap the deriving fog on the high altitude wetlands of the Andes, called, called paramos.

Among the world The fastest evolutionary ecosystemsWet paramos contrast with arid climates of the rest of the Andes. Although they cover only 1.7% of Colombia, they provide the nation 85% of its drinking water, which is stored in the Frelejones trunks during the water cycle and then released in lakes and sailors. All this humidity has historically made paramos resistant to the ignition and spread of forest fires.

But this year, an unprecedented forest season has seen paramos take fire to Colombia. A forest fire burned more than 100 acres of Frailejones in the northeast of Berlin Paramo of Colombia. More than 500 fires have burned across the country since the beginning of 2024, consuming at least 42,000 acres of forests and meadows and to cover the Colombian capital, Bogotá, in a veil of polluting smoke.

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The Colombian forest fire season generally coincides with its dry season from December to March, and the number of flames and the burned area vary from year to year. A study in 2022 in Fire revisedData from 2000 to 2020 and found that Colombia sees 100 to 300 forest fires in typical January; This year marks the first time that the total of the month exceeded 500 fires since the nation began to systematically collect data on forest fires in 1998. Although humans initially caused almost all of the fires of this year, the heat and the drought of the climate aggravated them only usually.

In fragile paramos, in particular, “the fire regime has changed”, explains Mauricio Aguilar Garavito, an ecologist of forest fires at Pontifical University Xavierian in Colombia. Analyzes of the layers of old sediment show that over the past 10,000 years, the Northern Andes paramos have burned about once every 100 to 1,000 years. “Now,” said Aguilar Garavito, “there are fires every two at 10.”

January 2024 – Using the summer of the southern hemisphere – was the hottest in Colombia in January in 30 years, said Ghisliane Echeverry Prieto, director of the Colombia Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies, in a press issue at the end of last month. Temperatures reached record From 44 degrees Celsius (111 degrees Fahrenheit) in Honda, a small town in the center of Colombia flanked by four paramo ecosystems.

This heat exacerbates a historic drought in the wider region because the warmer temperatures mean that the air derives more humidity from the plants. The drier plant, especially debris on forest floors, takes fire more easily. It also burn forest fires more intensely and spread faster.

The current heat and drought can be linked to both climate change and to the cyclic climate model known as El Niño, which has warmer waters than the average through the Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean. The heat that these waters release in the atmosphere causes a cascade of changes in weather conditions around the world. Extreme heat increases are a characteristic of climate change, and the fingerprints of global warming have been found in many heat waves, some of which have brought summer -shaped temperatures in certain parts of South America last winter.

A study published at the end of January by the consortium of researchers in the world meteorological allocation (WWA) also found that drought now affecting the entire Amazon basin being mainly motivated by climate changewith an amplification of El Niño. When low precipitation and high evaporation rates are considered, drought has been carried out 30 times more likely by climate change, the researchers revealed.

The effects of driver's forest fires, warming temperatures and El Niño are also felt as far south as the province of Valparaíso Chile, where devastating and mortal forest fires have consumed 64,000 acres And 14,000 houses And has cost the lives of more than 131 people since February 2. But while El Niño's influence on fire in Colombia comes mainly from the dry time than it brings, its influence in Chile comes more hot temperatures, explains Raúl Cordero Carrasco, air conditioning and mechanical engineer at the University of Santiago, in Chile.

Adding to the risk of fire is the “degradation of Colombia ecosystems,” says Aguilar Garavito. The forests of Los Cerros Orientales, a mountain range just east of Bogotá, contain several invasive plant species and fire subjects, including eucalyptus and Pinus Oocarpa, A pine from Mexico and Central America. The fallen leaves and the pine needles litter the under-building of these forests of dense flasks, where this material becomes ignition in the middle of booming temperatures and dry air.

Aguilar Garavito claims that the country's abyssal management of fires “has also played a role in Colombia forest fires. As in the United States, the authorities have focused on the abolition of fires rather than on an integrated management strategy that uses controlled burns, which could help reduce fuel available for forest fires.

Although the recent rains have helped firefighters control flames, the coming months should bring even warmer temperatures that will probably persist until the spring rainy season, Echeverry Prieto said during the press briefing.

Looking further in the future, Aguilar Garavito says that forest fires in paramos should become more frequent and more serious in the coming decades. A master's thesis in 2018 by Manuela Rueda Trujillo, then at the National University of Colombia in Medellín, noted that the paramos of Colombia pushed drier Since the end of the last ice age. A study published in Plos a In 2019, this trend was amplified by anthropogenic climate change In recent decades, and that Andean paramos should grow even drier in the decades to come. A study in 2022 written by Gwendolyn Peyre of the University of the Andes in Colombia and published in Boundaries in ecology and evolution found that 10% of endemic species of paramos “could undergo extinction by 2070. “”

“The paramos are very special ecosystems in terms of limited distribution, their hydrological functioning and endemic species that live there, but they are also extremely fragile,” explains Rueda Trujillo, which is now a doctorate. candidate at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “Given this, more intense, frequent and long -term fires have certainly endangered the persistence of paramos' biodiversity – not only Frailejones – as well as their hydrological functioning.”

Among the burnt remains of these unique ecosystems, she says: “It's really sad to see what remains after the fires.”

This article is also Available in Spanish.