Join us as Lucas Gonzalez (CIPR Mid-Career Fellow and Researcher at CONICET) gives a talk on the Politics of Wildfires.

In 2019, the year Jair Bolsonaro took office in Brazil, the national space research agency reported more than 72,000 fire outbreaks in the Amazon, an 83 percent increase in the number of fires over the same period in 2018. Environmentalists and NGOs denounced the government’s alliance with agriculture and mining businesses, combined with cuts to the budgets of environmental agencies, as accelerating wildfires. Bolsonaro replied that NGOs set the Amazon on fire to bring him down. Despite being natural elements in ecosystems, previous research shows that environmental, demographic, and socioeconomic factors influence their occurrence. Controlling for what we know so far, do wildfires increase when governments are allied with members of the agribusiness, extractive industries, and the real estate sector? This work aims to determine whether specific types of political alliances are more closely associated with the occurrence of wildfires. The study uses a multilevel hierarchical regression to examine how wildfire size varies with the sectoral composition of governmental alliances across Argentine provinces, 2001–2021. It also explores three cases, Santiago del Estero, Salta, and Chaco, which show how different alliances are associated with wildfires. In the conclusion, it presents some comparative implications and raises some questions for future research.