Incidents in South America
16,647 incidents have been recorded across 12 countries in South America by Global Incident Tracker, 16,040 of them in 2026. Fires make up a larger share of the record here than anywhere else in the world. These are incidents our sources reported, not a regional total.
Continuous monitoring began 9 August 2026. These counters show what we have recorded since then, not everything that happened.
What South America records more of than the world
Every region has a different shape. This compares each hazard's share of South America's own record against its share of the global record — so a figure above 1.0 means the hazard is a bigger part of the picture here than it is anywhere else, regardless of how large the region is.
Read these as a measure of the record, not of danger. A ratio is shaped by two things at once: what actually happens, and who reports it. Hazards with no official feed anywhere — air, road and rail accidents, building collapses, fires, blasts — reach us only through news, so a region with dense local media will show more of them than a region with sparse media, even when the underlying risk is the same. A high number here means we hold more records, and that is not the same claim.
| Hazard | Records | Share here | vs world |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fire | 2,246 | 13.5% | 1.97× |
| Volcanic Eruption | 111 | 0.7% | 1.93× |
| Road Accident | 409 | 2.5% | 1.55× |
| Wildfire | 6,249 | 37.5% | 1.32× |
| Epidemic | 636 | 3.8% | 1.29× |
| Tornado | 25 | 0.2% | 1.08× |
Countries in South America
| # | Country | Records |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Brazil | 8,295 |
| 2 | Peru | 2,031 |
| 3 | Colombia | 1,949 |
| 4 | Chile | 1,382 |
| 5 | Argentina | 922 |
| 6 | Bolivia | 830 |
| 7 | Venezuela | 558 |
| 8 | Ecuador | 338 |
| 9 | Paraguay | 217 |
| 10 | Guyana | 58 |
| 11 | Suriname | 50 |
| 12 | Uruguay | 17 |
When South America is busiest
September carries the most records we hold for South America. This is when incidents were reported, so read a quiet month as either a quiet month or thin reporting.
| Month | Recorded | |
|---|---|---|
| January | 100 | |
| February | 108 | |
| March | 123 | |
| April | 103 | |
| May | 139 | |
| June | 125 | |
| July | 144 | |
| August | 696 | |
| September | 10,000 | |
| October | 4,865 | |
| November | 119 | |
| December | 125 |
How much of this is news, not data
20% of what we hold for South America falls in hazard categories that have no official real-time feed anywhere in the world — building collapses, road and rail accidents, fires, blasts, stampedes. Those records exist because a journalist wrote something.
That number is worth carrying with every other number on this page. Which hazards have no feed →