‘There’s fire all around us, this is it’ – This is climate breakdown

Location Pantanal, Brazil

Disaster Wildfires, a number of years

This is Abbie’s story

Abbie Martin splits her time between captaining a boat in the Virgin Islands and doing research in Brazil’s Pantanal, a region that includes the world’s largest tropical wetland and where she founded the Jaguar Identification Project. Fires in the Pantanal have reached new extremes, killing at least 17 million vertebrate animals and burning 27% of the vegetation cover in 2020. Climate breakdown made the Pantanal drier between 2001-21, increasing the occurrence of above-average fires in the region.

I’m usually down in the Pantanal during the dry season – jaguar season – when everything’s just holding on, waiting for the first rains. From December to April, the Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland, is flooded. The water is crystal clear, it’s green, lush and beautiful. Then in June, the drought starts. Everything’s brown. There’s a mark left on all the trees of where the water level was. Everyone is congregated next to the major water sources, including jaguars.