Climate change and deforestation have intensified wildfires in the Amazon. Volunteer brigades have become an essential part of integrated fire management.

The loud crackles of burning twigs are the first to hit. Then, the scorched smell. Soon afterwards, columns of white and yellow smoke emerge, so thick they look solid. On the ground, flames as tall as people almost seem to disappear. 

It’s 4 pm on a sunny summer day in Ponta de Pedras, a town of roughly 25,000 inhabitants on Marajó Island in the Brazilian Amazon.  Behind the towers of smoke, volunteers at the local brigade, Guradiões das Chamas (“guardians of the flame”), are dots of fluorescent orange and yellow, moving in rehearsed synchronicity. 

“Fire can be your friend or your enemy,” Cosmerina D’Ávila, Guardiões das Chamas’ chief of brigade, told Health Policy Watch. An educator and farmer, she has witnessed wildfires surge over the years in Ponta de Pedras. 

But this is not a wildfire. It’s a drill. 

Since late 2025, the brigade has been trained as part of Marajó Sem Fumaça (Marajó without smoke), an initiative by Brazilian non-profit Instituto Ar, Brazilian climate tech Umgrauemeio and the Clean Air Fund, to mitigate the risk of wildfires on the island. 

The project combines a high-resolution camera powered by AI software that identifies early signs of smoke and sends instant text alerts, with the brigade’s technical and territorial knowledge, to improve local fire response.  

Guided by a trained wildfire responder, seven of Guardiões das Chamas’ 15 volunteers set and put out a fire in a 900m2 area in less than two hours. It was the largest drill yet, and the last one before the real deal.

From firefighting to fire management

In 2024, Brazil’s fire policy went through a paradigm shift, replacing “the reactive logic of firefighting with a preventive, territorial, and integrated approach,” according to Marajó Sem Fumaça’s policy brief. 

In the past, Umgrauemeio’s innovation coordinator Julia Castro explains, a “zero fire” policy criminalized all burning, stopping traditional fire management. Without controlled fires, biofuel accumulated on the ground and led to more intense and frequent wildfires that spread into previously unburned areas.  

The new legal framework acknowledges fire as an ecological, cultural, socioeconomic, and climatic phenomenon. It also recognizes the key role played by the country’s roughly 200 volunteer brigades, as reflected in the dedicated national strategy issued in June.

“That’s the thing with fire,” Castro said. “Whether it’s good or bad depends on where, when and by whom it was set, and on whether or not it was planned.” 

Climate is changing – and so is fire

For traditional communities in the Amazon, fire has always been a part of life. D’Ávila recalls how her parents and grandparents used it for cooking, making pottery and clearing land for farming. 

“Fire was simply an instrument,” she said. But back then, it didn’t burn as much, she added.    

Human-induced climate change has made the Amazon almost 30 times more prone to blazes. 

“The forest is growing drier,” said Patrícia Ferrini, global health and climate expert, and coordinator of Marajó Sem Fumaça. “As a result, fires are more likely to escalate into wildfires.”

That has altered the ancestral ways in which communities related to fire, said Ferrini. Knowledge passed down through generations – from where to burn to the right time to burn  – no longer suffices to keep it under control. 

Still, the routine use of fire persists in Ponta de Pedras. Multiple times a day, Guardiões das Chamas volunteers receive smoke alerts on their phones, with photographs and geocoordinates attached. 

Not every notification warrants deploying the whole crew, though. For those like D’Ávila, familiar with the territory, the information on these alerts is often enough to discern real threats from “just a neighbor burning their trash”.  

That, she says, optimizes the brigade’s time and allows them to “focus on the wildfires that will actually cause major damage.”

Deforestation drives Amazon fires

The Amazon is the epicenter of Brazil’s fires. But unlike other biomes where they are a natural occurrence, in the world’s largest rainforest, fires are the result of what Castro calls “disturbance”, or human action. 

Deforestation is the main culprit. Burning is the fastest and cheapest way of clearing land, so it has become “one of the go-to tools for illegal deforestation,” according to Claudio Angelo, international policy coordinator at Observatório do Clima. 

In 2025 alone, more than half of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon was driven by forest fires, accounting for 51%, while 48% was due to clear-cutting, and 1% to mining. 

In May 2025, deforestation in the Amazon reached 960 km², representing a 92% increase compared to the same month in 2024, the acting Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, João Paulo Capobianco, told Agência Brasil.

Data from Brazil’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Removals Estimating System (SEEG), shows that 72% of all national emissions come from land use change and agriculture, and in Brazil, these activities are synonymous with land clearing.  

Deforestation also fuels a fiery feedback loop. Over the past 35 years, it has accounted for a 74% decline in rainfall and a 16% increase in peak air temperatures in the Amazon, changes that have made the forest more flammable than ever. 

This year’s El Niño has the Amazon on high alert. The prolonged and intensified droughts caused by the phenomenon’s last visits in 2016 and 2024 were followed by the worst wildfire seasons on record in the region.  

Globally, forests cover 4.14 billion hectares, or almost one-third of the world’s land area, and the current rate of deforestation is 10.9 million hectares per year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025.

Fire affects an average of 261 million hectares of land annually, nearly half of which is forested.

While deforestation has slowed in all regions of the world in the last decade, South America has the highest forest loss every year.

Meanwhile, the global rate of forest expansion has also decreased, from 9.88 million hectares annually in 2000–2015 to 6.78 million in 2015–2025.

Fire impacts on human health

While the volunteers geared up and prepared to start the drill, Wemerson Ferreira rode his motorcycle back and forth with fresh coffee and ice-cold water. His home is in the lot adjacent to the field about to burn. He can’t take on the fire, but wanted to pitch in. 

Ferreira must be gone before the first flicker. “If I stay, you’ll see just how fast I start getting sick,” he told HPW. “It gets hard to breathe.”

Over the past 10 years, he has lived through two wildfires that almost devoured the family’s house and crops. Every whiff of smoke ignites a reminder in his injured lungs. 

Air pollution is the largest environmental threat to human health, with links to one in eight deaths worldwide. A major contributor to its lethality, wildfire smoke is projected to be the cause of 1.4 million premature deaths annually by the end of the century.  

Soot and smoke contain hazardous particles which, when inhaled, enter the lungs and reach the bloodstream, damaging arteries, neurons and multiple organs. In time, that can lead to cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. 

Europe, which is heating faster than the global average due to climate change, experienced record-breaking fires, in the past few years.

In the Brazilian Amazon, wildfires increased respiratory hospital admissions by 38% and circulatory hospital admissions by 27% over the course of a decade. Preventing and mitigating them, Ferrini says, is a form of healthcare. 

Education is key to fire management

Ferreira believes accurate information about fire management is life-changing, adding that he almost lost everything because of his lack of knowledge. 

Most of those who have joined Guardiões das Chamas’s training have tales of loss, said Josiane de Morais, a nursing technician and member of the brigade.

Her story was from decades ago, before her 24-year-old son was born, when her grandparents’ home caught fire. She witnessed how friends and neighbors desperately tried and failed to put it out. 

“That’s why we must go beyond firefighting, and why our work must include education,” Morais said. “So that there are no more such tragedies.”  

Marajó Sem Fumaça has made education one of its pillars, developing and distributing an informational pamphlet rooted in traditional knowledge and language, with best practices for fire management in the context of the climate crisis. 

During a drop-by to inspect the source of a smoke hotspot detected by the AI software, brigade volunteers were met by a resident already familiar with the material. 

“She had followed all the instructions,” D’Ávila said. “My eyes welled up to see that this little seed we planted has germinated and is bearing fruit.”

The bumpy waterway ahead

A couple of days after the fire drill, Guardiões das Chamas was officially presented to the community of Ponta de Pedras. Between concerts of beloved local dance carimbó celebrating the last week of summer holidays, the volunteers got up on stage in full gear and made themselves and the brigade known.  

“Now that we’ve been properly introduced,” Morais said, “we can start our work.” 

The journey ahead, however, is uphill. Beyond the urban downtown of Ponta de Pedras, getting around depends on river levels. In winter, only boats can cross the high waters. During the summer droughts, cars and motorcycles can travel on the dirt roads — unless it rains and they get too muddy. 

This landscape is one of the many obstacles for the fire response. In spite of the support from Marajó Sem Fumaça, the brigade still lacks much of the infrastructure and resources it needs to keep going. 

Besides, Morais notes, they are volunteers “trying to do their best” – not paid employees of the brigade. They each have other obligations, so dropping everything over a smoke alert isn’t always be an option. 

Nonetheless, D’Ávila expects that things will only get better from here, “recruiting more people, getting more equipment and securing transportation.” 

As the Amazon enters a new drought season, with wildfires expected to surge, the captain of the brigade knows there are no more drills or do-overs. She knows it’s up to them to guard the flames in Ponta de Pedras, and they are “eager to get into action,” she says.

Image Credits: Amanda Magnani, SEEG.