Brazil has increased wildfire spending and has hired a record number of federal firefighters in anticipation of extreme drought in the Amazon due to what could be one of the strongest El Niño events in more than a century. The El Niño climate pattern, which emerges from unusually warm waters in the tropical Pacific, typically brings hotter, drier conditions to large parts of the Amazon. This raises the risk of severe drought and large wildfires. With a ‘strong’ to ‘very strong’ El Niño predicted this year, the impacts on the world’s largest rainforest are also expected to be more extreme. “I’m not calm. I’m very alert,” João Paulo Sotero, director of deforestation and fire policy at Brazil’s environment ministry, told Mongabay in a video interview. “We are much better prepared [now] than we were in 2024 and 2025 … we are prepared for the worst scenario.” Sotero said Brazil has increased funding for fire management in 2026 to 1.023 billion reais ($197 million), up 28% from 2025, or 24% after adjusting for inflation, rising after pro–deforestation president Jair Bolsonaro left office at the end of 2022. The budget is now five times larger than it was in 2019. The environment ministry also hired 4,410 additional federal firefighters for the 2026 fire season. In 2024, 3,224 firefighters were hired, while 4,358 firefighters were hired in 2025. Map by Emilie Languedoc/Mongabay. According to Sotero, his team has identified high-risk locations in the Amazon to focus efforts, including a new deforestation frontier in…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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