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Criminals may be leveraging climate change as record acreage burns in Brazil's Amazon

Wildfires in Brazil have swept through an area the size of Switzerland, a level of destruction that will take decades to recover, if it ever does, according to a new satellite assessment. The breadth of forest that has been lost or degraded was revealed as smoke that has blanketed the country cleared, thanks to rains that may be ending the worst drought Brazil has ever recorded. “The data is exceptionally alarming, it's a very abrupt surge,” Ane Alencar, science director at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, a Brazilian nonprofit, told The Associated Press.

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