Colombia, located at the junction of Central and South America, is home to nearly 10 percent of the world's biodiversity. Its ecosystems range from the Andean highlands to the vast plains and Amazon rainforests. Its iconic species include dozens of representatives of the genus. Spelecia: Plants similar to Seussian plants, commonly called frailejohns, or “big monks”. Their rosettes of succulent, hairy leaves crown thick and spongy trunks that trap the mist that drifts over the unique and delicate high-altitude Andean wetlands called support.
Among the world's fastest growing ecosystemsThe humid páramos contrasts with the arid climate of the rest of the Andes. Although they cover only 1.7 percent of Colombia's landmass, they provide the nation with 85 percent of its drinking water—much of it stored in the trunks of freylejons during the water cycle and then released into lakes and waterways. All this moisture has historically made páramos resistant to ignition and the spread of wildfires.
But this year, an unprecedented wildfire season has caused páramos to go up in flames across Colombia. One wildfire burned more than 100 acres of freilejones in the northeastern Colombian region of Berlin-Paramo alone. Since the start of 2024, more than 500 fires have burned across the country, destroying at least 42,000 acres of forest and grassland and blanketing Colombia's capital Bogota in a blanket of fire. polluting smoke.
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Burnt Espeletia plants after a forest fire in the Berlin paramo in the department of Santander, Colombia, January 25, 2024. Photo: Miguel Vergel/AFP via Getty Images
Colombia's wildfire season typically coincides with the dry season from December to March, and the number of fires and areas burned varies from year to year. 2022 Study in Fire revieweddata from 2000 to 2020 and found that Colombia sees In a typical January, there are between 100 and 300 wildfires.; This year, the monthly total has surpassed 500 since the country began systematically collecting wildfire data in 1998. humans initially caused almost all the fires this yearclimate-induced heat and drought made them worse than usual.
Especially in the fragile páramos, “the fire regime has changed,” says Mauricio Aguilar Garavito, a wildfire ecologist at the Pontifical Xaverian University in Colombia. Analysis of ancient sediment layers shows that over the past 10,000 years or so, páramos in the Northern Andes have burned about once every 100 to 1,000 years. “Now,” says Aguilar Garavito, “fires happen every two to ten years.”
January 2024 — at the height of summer in the Southern Hemisphere — was Colombia's hottest January in 30 years, said Ghisliane Echeverri Prieto, director of Colombia's Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Research, at a press briefing late last month. Temperature reached record highs It's 44 degrees Celsius (111 degrees Fahrenheit) in Honda, a small town in central Colombia surrounded by four páramo ecosystems.
This heat is exacerbating a historic drought across the wider region as warmer temperatures cause the air to pull more moisture from plants. Drier plant matter, especially debris on the forest floor, is more easily flammable. This also leads to more intense burning and faster spread of wildfires.
A police officer extinguishes a wildfire in Nemocon, Columbia, January 24, 2024. About twenty wildfires have sparked alarm in Bogota and several regions of Colombia amid record temperatures partly linked to El Niño. Credit: LUIS ACOSTA/AFP via Getty Images
The current heat and drought may be related to both climate change and cyclical climate pattern known as El Niñowhich has warmer than average waters in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. The heat these waters release into the atmosphere causes a cascade of changes in weather patterns around the world. Increasing extreme heat is a hallmark of climate change, and traces of global warming have been found in numerous heat waves, including those that brought… summer temperatures in parts of South America last winter.
A study published in late January by a consortium of World Weather Attribution (WWA) researchers also found that drought is now affecting the entire Amazon basin is primarily driven by climate changewith some strengthening of El Niño. The researchers found that, given both low rainfall and high evaporation rates, the likelihood of drought was 30 times higher due to climate change.
The effects of wildfires such as drought, warming and El Niño are being felt as far south as the Chilean province of Valparaiso, where the devastating and destructive consequences deadly forest fires used up 64,000 acres And 14,000 houses and has killed more than 131 people since February 2. But while El Niño's impact on fires in Colombia is driven largely by the drier weather it brings, in Chile its impact is largely driven by warmer temperatures, says Raúl Cordero Carrasco, a climate scientist and mechanical engineer at the University of Santiago, Chile.
Rescuers help extinguish a forest fire near the Doña Juan landfill on January 24, 2024 in Bogota, Colombia. More than twenty forest fires have been reported in Bogota and several regions of Colombia amid record high temperatures. Credit: Diego Cuevas/Getty Images
Adding to the risk of fires is the “degradation of Colombia’s ecosystems,” says Aguilar Garavito. The forests of Los Cerros Orientales, a mountain range east of Bogotá, contain several invasive and fire-prone plant species, including eucalyptus and oocarpa pine, pine tree native to Mexico and Central America. Fallen leaves and pine needles litter the understory of these dense mountain forests, where the material ignites in high temperatures and dry air.
Aguilar Garavito says the country's “terrible fire management” also played a role in Colombia's wildfires. As in the US, authorities have focused on fire suppression rather than an integrated management strategy that uses controlled burns, which can help reduce the amount of fuel available for wildfires.
While recent rains have helped firefighters bring some fires under control, even hotter weather is expected in the coming months and will likely persist until the spring rainy season begins, Echeverri Prieto said during a press briefing.
People living near a wildfire help firefighters battle blazes in southern Bogota, Colombia, on the fourth day of citywide wildfires, January 25, 2024. Photo: Christian Bayona/Long Visual Press/Alamy Live News
Looking to the future, Aguilar Garavito says wildfires in Páramos are likely to become more frequent and severe in the coming decades. A 2018 master's thesis by Manuela Rueda Trujillo, then at the National University of Colombia in Medellin, found that Colombia's páramos became drier since the end of the last ice age. A study published in PLOS ONE in 2019 found that this trend intensified by anthropogenic climate change over the past decades, and that the Andean páramos is expected to become even drier in the coming decades. A 2022 study conducted by Gwendolyn Peyre of the Universidad des Andes in Colombia and published in the journal Frontiers of ecology and evolution found that 10 percent of the endemic Páramos species “may disappear by 2070“
“Páramos are special ecosystems in terms of their limited distribution, hydrological functioning and the endemic species that live there, but they are also extremely fragile,” says Rueda Trujillo, now a Ph.D. candidate at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “Given this, more intense, frequent and longer-lasting fires in the long term certainly threaten the conservation of the biodiversity of the páramos – not just the frailjones – as well as their hydrological functioning.”
Of the scorched remains of these unique ecosystems, she said, “it’s really sad to see what’s left after the fires.”
This article also available in Spanish.
