Brazil’s ‘Paradise’ on fire: ‘The forest is burning. Animals are burning. Everything’s burning’

“All of that up there is Paradise,” said Maria Moraes de Souza, gesturing to the string of villages among which she lives along one of the Amazon’s most important waterways.

But lately life in this supposedly Arcadian community has taken a toxic turn, as the River Madeira’s waters have fallen to their lowest level since the 1960s and the skies overhead have filled with smoke from wildfires that are raging across Brazil .

“I’ve never seen it like this,” said Souza, a 44-year-old subsistence farmer as her canoe glided through the murk towards her smog-shrouded hamlet, chaperoned by river dolphins whose aquatic home is growing smaller by the day.

To reach Souza’s wooden house in Paraíso Grande (Big Paradise) – a former rubber-tapping community near the port town of Humaitá – visitors must now scale a sun-scorched bluff that has been exposed by the plummeting waters. Vast, desert-like expanses of red-hot sand lie between some river-dwellers and the waters on which they depend for food, transport, education and work. Some of those beaches are hundreds of metres wide.

“In the old days we used to understand the river’s rise and fall … But lately man has started to affect nature to such an extent that we no longer know how things work,” complained village leader José Francisco Vieira dos Santos, describing how the Amazon’s annual rainy and dry seasons were being scrambled for reasons locals struggled to comprehend.

“Even the animals can feel the change,” added Santos, 42. An Amazon catfish called the “bodó” used to lay its eggs in January. Now locals said it was happening as early as October. “Everything has spun out of control,” said Santos, who suspected construction of two hydroelectric dams further up the Madeira had added to the problem.

Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – whose administration has faced criticism over what some consider its sluggish response to the crisis – has painted his country’s tribulations as part of a growing global emergency fuelled by climate change.

“Hurricanes in the Caribbean, typhoons in Asia, drought and flooding in Africa, and torrential rain in Europe have left a trail of death and destruction,” Lula told the UN general assembly last week, adding record floods, fires and drought in Brazil to that list. “The planet is no longer waiting to make the next generation pay the price and is fed up with climate deals that are not fulfilled.”

This year’s drought – which authorities have called the most intense and widespread in Brazil’s history – has brought misery to those who live along the Madeira, and other major Amazon waterways, including the Solimões and the Negro.

In Porto Velho, the largest city on the Madeira, passenger ships have found themselves high and dry because the waters are no longer deep enough to set sail. “We’ve been stuck here for two weeks,” said 50-year-old skipper Aurean Guimarães, whose wooden ferry was stranded at a sun-baked port called Cai N’ água (literally “Fall in the Water”).

It’s scary to think that this might be the best extreme drought that we have in the next 20 years

Erika Berenguer, Oxford University

“The river’s so dry. There’s so much sand. So many rocks … This is the first year we’ve faced something like this,” Guimarães complained as the Madeira hit its lowest level since 1967. A banner hanging from the ferry’s top deck declared: “SOS”.

Indigenous communities have been hit particularly hard, with dozens of waterways drying up and dry vegetation supercharging wildfires that are ripping through their ancestral homes. Megaron Txucarramãe, an Indigenous leader from the Amazon state of Mato Grosso, said at least four territories in his region were going up in smoke, including in the Capoto Jarina area where a firefighter was killed in the blaze.

“I’ve lived here since I was born and I’ve never seen the forest burn like this … The forest is burning. Animals are burning. Trees are burning. Everything’s burning,” he said, lamenting how Indigenous sages who understood rain patterns were no longer alive to help out. “The firefighters aren’t managing to put out these fires – only rain can do this.”

Erika Berenguer, a tropical forest expert from Oxford University who studies the Amazon, said she feared climate change meant that 2024’s “apocalyptic scenario” and “dystopian sunsets” might simply be a glimpse of an even bleaker future.

“It’s scary to think that this might be the best extreme drought that we have in the next 20 years. Because … in terms of the Amazon, we already have across the basin a 1.5-degree increase in temperature [since the 1970s]. Parts of the basin have a dry season that is one week longer [than before]. Parts of the basin have a dry season that is 34% drier,” she said.

Scientists attributed a 2023 drought that punished the Amazon to the natural climate phenomenon El Niño. But Berenguer noted how the strongest El Niño on record – 1998’s so-called “King Kong” event – “didn’t have the impacts that it’s having now, either in terms of river drought or in terms of fires”.

“Why is that?” she added. “Because from 1998 to 2024, the climate has already changed … Any extreme drought is already happening on top of [that]. So the impacts of drought are just exacerbated, and everything becomes really, really dry.”

Related: ‘It’s guerrilla warfare’: Brazil fire teams fight Amazon blazes – and the arsonists who start them

Speaking at the UN, Lula admitted more needed to be done to tackle the fires and the drought and vowed to continue his crackdown on the environmental criminals growing rich from wrecking nature.

In Paraíso Grande, where most residents declared themselves supporters of the politician they affectionately call “Papai Lula” (Daddy Lula), locals hope the president is true to his word and urged him to come to their rescue by sending humanitarian aid.

“This heatwave is just crazy – and it’s because of these folk who are just setting everything on fire,” said Maria Delcy Barros de Moraes, blaming the farmers, ranchers and loggers whose use of fire to clear land has caused the wildfires to spread. “Why,” she wondered, “must the righteous always pay for the sinners?”