Colombia Environmental Alert: Wildfires raged for days in the Colombian Amazon.
Bogotá:
A multi-day wildfire in the Colombian Amazon on Saturday put the country’s capital Bogota on environmental alert as poor air quality spanned an area the size of Paris, authorities said. blame said.
Winds carrying smoke from some of the fires blamed on armed groups 350 kilometers (220 miles) northwest, as far as the Colombian capital.
Bogota Mayor Claudia Lopez said on Twitter that more than half of the capital’s air quality monitoring stations had not been on the charts in the past 48 hours.
“That’s why, as a measure to protect the environment,” the city issued an environmental warning, she wrote.
Lopez urged her city’s eight million residents to limit outdoor physical activity in the coming days.
Authorities have blamed the fires on former rebels who did not accept a 2016 peace agreement with the government, saying they burned trees to raise livestock on the land.
In the central province of Guaviare, governor Haydeer Palacio, declared a “red alert” state due to wildfires that have engulfed 10,000 hectares of land, an area equivalent to the total area of the French capital.
January this year was the hottest month in the Colombian Amazon region in a decade, also leading to an increase in wildfires in the southeast region, according to a report by the Environment Ministry reported on Friday by AFP. affect the air quality in the capital.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and was automatically generated from the syndication feed.)
