Following fieldwork in the Capoto/Jarina Indigenous territory in Brazil and a recent co-authored article in Communications Earth & Environment during COP30, Michel Valette, Research Associate at the Centre of Environmental Policy and the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society shares his reflections on how properly financed Indigenous-led fire management can protect the Amazon rainforest.
When delegates arrived in Belém for COP30, they stepped into the humid heart of the Brazilian Amazon, a striking contrast to just 14 months earlier, when the region was blanketed in smoke from the largest Amazonian wildfires in at least forty years. These wildfires illustrate how climate change is reshaping fire regimes: fire seasons are becoming longer and more intense across the globe, especially in the Amazon. This has led to larger burned areas in forested regions and the rise of large and difficult-to-control wildfires.
Over the last two years, I investigated the rapid escalation of wildfire risks, the damages caused by large wildfires, and community-led adaptation in the Capoto/Jarina Indigenous territory.
Indigenous and local communities show remarkable adaptive capacity in the face of rapidly intensifying wildfires. However, they urgently need greater and direct funding for community-led fire prevention and adaptation to sustain their efforts and support the conservation of the world’s largest tropical rainforest.
Below, I explain why recognising and financing Indigenous-led fire management is not only a matter of climate justice; it is a precondition to safeguard the Amazon’s future.
The 2024 wildfire season in the Amazon: a symptom of changing fire regimes
In 2024, a strong El Ninõ event triggered the most severe drought on record across the Amazon basin, causing a sharp rise in the number and intensity of wildfires.
In total, 15 million hectares of land burned, more than double the yearly average over the past four decades, while the proportion of burned areas covered by forest also doubled. In the northeast of the Amazon, climate change made extreme fire weather 30-70 times more likely, leading to around four times more burned area than would have occurred otherwise.
Areas of the Brazilian Amazon with dense forest cover are now increasingly vulnerable, as forests no longer retain sufficient humidity. Indigenous and local communities, who have long preserved these forests and depend on them for their livelihoods, are thus particularly exposed to wildfire damages.
The impact of wildfires in Capoto/Jarina: from emergency to long-lasting impacts
In 2024, the Capoto/Jarina Indigenous Territory was among the most severely affected areas of the Brazilian Amazon: wildfires burned over 22% of its land, an area almost equivalent to London, and reached the surroundings of 10 of its 13 villages (Figure 1). Tragically, one member of the local fire brigade, Uellington Lopes dos Santos, lost his life.
There are multiple impacts of these wildfires. The most immediate is smoke exposure, which threatens the respiratory and cardiovascular health of community members, particularly for children and elders.
Participatory mapping, a research activity in which participants create a map of their village and surroundings, and interviews conducted by my research team and I shed light on the longer-term impacts of wildfires (Figure 2).
The burning of swidden plots stopped cassava production, triggering food shortages. Wildfires also reduced the availability of fruits, medicinal plants, and timber trees near villages, in turn affecting fishing productivity and driving wildlife away from burned areas close to villages.
Moreover, burned forests are more vulnerable to future wildfires due to tree mortality increasing the quantity of dry wood ready to burn and the amount of light reaching the soil, making the forest drier.
Together, these effects reduce food quantity, quality, and diversity, undermine community health and livelihoods, and make daily life more difficult. Our participatory mapping findings underscore the urgent need for wildfire prevention and targeted recovery strategies in areas critical to community livelihoods.
Living with fire in Capoto/Jarina: local adaptation to changing risk
The communities of Capoto/Jarina are already adapting to changing wildfire risks. In the past, people could use fire without endangering the forest. Today, the combined effects of climate change and invasive grasses make burning hazardous. Individually, people have adjusted how they burn, often at great cost: they burn their swiddens later in the season, clear firebreaks, burn in the late afternoon when fires are easier to control, seek assistance more frequently, and have abandoned some cultural fire practices.
The Capoto/Jarina Indigenous fire brigade
However, the most transformative change in fire management over the past two decades has been the creation of a local fire brigade. Initially voluntary, it has been integrated into the federal programme Prevfogo since 2024. The brigade supports community fire use and leads most wildfire suppression efforts.
In Piaraçu, the brigade was responsible for safely burning the swiddens of each family for several years, a particularly risky task there due to invasive grasses coming from pastoral land outside of Indigenous territories. In 2023 they extended this work across the entire territory. Increased funding from the federal government compared with previous years enabled this to happen, which allowed earlier recruitment and improved equipment. Along with favourable climatic conditions, these efforts substantially reduced the burned area: while 9,316 active fires were detected by the VIIRS satellite in September 2024, only 62 were recorded in September 2025.
From local action to global responsibility
While wildfire crises like those of 2024 are projected to multiply in the coming decades, securing sustainable funding is essential for Indigenous and local communities to adapt to rising wildfire risks.
On the first day of the COP30, over 40 countries and international organisations endorsed a call to action on “Integrated Fire Management and Wildfire Resilience”: an approach relying on preventive and context-based fire management practices. Early investment in prevention can significantly reduce the human, environmental, and financial costs of emergency response and post-fire restoration. This requires sufficient resources to strengthen fire brigades, enabling them to conduct effective prevention and recovery work, maintain sufficient equipment, and improve operational information systems that support their work.
At COP30, negotiators could address this, notably by recognising the drivers and impacts of wildfires in the Fund for responding to Loss and Damage.
Establishing accessible pathways for communities to benefit from funding could curb destructive wildfires, reduce costly emergency responses, protect biodiversity, and prevent major health and climate damage. This is essential to alleviate and adapt to the escalating consequences of climate change on the environment and society, especially for vulnerable groups such as Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities.
