RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL - Brazil saw a record 17,182 forest fires from January to April this year, according to satellite images from the Brazilian Institute of Space Research (INPE) released Thursday, more than half of them in the Amazon region.

The figure represented an 81 percent increase from the same period last year, and was the most forest fires recorded for this period in Brazil since data collection started in 1998.

The previous record was set in 2003, when 16,888 outbreaks were registered in the first four months of the year.

Brazil's Ministry of Environment blamed the increase on the effects of climate change, including drought, although the country's agribusiness sector routinely burns forests to create farmland.

Firefighters extinguish a fire in the municipality of Canta, Roraima state, Brazil, on February 29, 2024. (Photo by Alan CHAVES / AFP)

In the Brazilian Amazon, home to more than 60 percent of the world's largest rainforest, the INPE recorded 8,977 forest fire outbreaks from January to April, the highest since 2016.

This represents an increase of 153 percent compared to the same period last year.

The government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva cut Amazon deforestation in half during its first year in office last year, after it soared under his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro.

But the forest fire situation remains alarming.

"Forest fires in Brazil and other countries in the region, such as Chile and Colombia, have been intensified by climate change and by one of the strongest El Nino phenomena in history, which caused a long drought in many areas of the Amazon in 2023," the country's Environment Ministry said in a statement.