Extreme Drought in the Brazilian Pantanal in 2019–2020: Characterization, Causes, and Impacts

Abstract

The Pantanal region in South America is one of the world's largest wetlands. Since 2019, the Pantanal has suffered a prolonged drought that has spelled disaster for the region, and subsequent fires have engulfed hundreds of thousands of hectares. The lack of rainfall during the summers of 2019 and 2020 was caused by reduced transport of warm and humid summer air from Amazonia into the Pantanal. Instead, a predominance of warmer and drier air masses from subtropical latitudes contributed to a scarcity of summer rainfall at the peak of the monsoon season. This led to prolonged extreme drought conditions across the region. This drought had severe impacts on the hydrology of the Pantanal. Hydrometric levels fell all along the Paraguay River. In 2020, river levels reached extremely low values, and in some sections of this river, transportation had to be restricted. Very low river levels affected the mobility of people and shipping of soybeans and minerals to the Atlantic Ocean by the Hidrovia -Paraná-Paraguai (Paraná-Paraguay Waterway). This study is directed to better understand the hydroclimatic aspects of the current drought in the Brazilian Pantanal and their impacts on natural and human systems. As a consequence of the drought, fires spread and affected natural biodiversity as well as the agribusiness and cattle ranching sectors. While fires had serious socioecological and economic consequences, we do not intend to investigate the effect of the downstream low-level waters on the Pantanal ecosystems or the drought in the risk of fire.

Identifying local‐scale meteorological conditions favorable to large fires in Brazil

“…Potentially, anomalous weather and climate conditions can promote any of the fire types to grow into large fires, increasing the hazard for this type of disaster. Second, we do recognize the limitation of the results due to the relatively short length of available dataset (2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015), which misses the more recent large fires in 2019 and 2020 (Marengo et al, 2021;Silveira et al, 2020). As this analysis relies on using daily GFED dataset, currently updated to 2015 (http://globalfiredata.org/pages/ data/), but there is planned work to update the results as soon as the daily product is released post-2015.…”

Increased Climate Pressure on the New Agricultural Frontier in the Eastern Amazonia-Cerrado Transition Zone

“…These oceanic temperature increases favor the occurrence of anomalous regional water de cits, warmer temperatures, and intense re seasons [15][16][17][18][19] . This has been the case for the exceptional droughts in Amazonia in 2005 20 , 2010 21,22 , 2015-16 [23][24][25] , and in the Pantanal 2019-20 26,27 . These events are also occurring under a regime of regional warming and drying trends, more evident from the 80s on, particularly over Southeastern Amazon 2,25,[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36] .…”

Diversity of insect galls from Mato Grosso State, Brazil: North Pantanal

“…The Pantanal biome occupies 20% of the Brazilian territory (Junk et al 2013), extending its distribution over two Brazilian States, Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul. The Brazilian wetlands, called Pantanal popularly, are considered a hyper-seasonal savannah under contrasting stresses due to alternation between periods of drought and prolonged flooding (Eiten 1982, Marengo et al 2021. Pantanal harbors deciduous or semi-deciduous forests shedding leaves during the dry season, deciduous forest and Cerrado vegetation in inselbergs and evergreen floodplain forests in the lower areas along rivers and channels (Nunes da Cunha et al 2007).…”

“…But, in the winter of 2020, the flooding did not occur. All available dry matter functioned as fuel and burned large extensions of the Pantanal, destroying much this biome's rich fauna and flora due to deforestation, cleaning, and reforming pastures using improper management practice without control techniques endanger the conservation (Marengo et al 2021). In this terrible scenario, our inventory represents a unique testimony of insect-plant interactions consumed by the fire.…”