More than 74,000 fires have burned the Amazon rainforest in Brazil since January according to the country’s National Institute for Space Research. 9,500 new forest fires have ignited in just 1 week of August due to natural dry season and fires intentionally ignited to clear forest. The Amazon rainforest were ravaged by fire with black smoke billows releasing from the treetops, spreading across parts of South America and even shrouding the coastal city of São Paulo in near darkness.
Jonathan Foley, an Environmental scientist based in San Francisco, said that globally about 10 to 15 percent of our CO2 emissions comes from deforestation and if this is going back up again in Brazil it is going to make climate change even worse. He is leading the Project Drawdown, a worldwide network of scientists, advocates and others proposing solutions to global warming.
Globally it is erasing a decade or two worth of progress and becoming a big problem for the world in terms of climate change. And locally, regionally too it is a huge problem for people who are dependent on the forest and have preserved them for millennia. It is a huge global tragedy.
The fires have triggered global alarm along with concerns about biodiversity and climate change. French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have urged other leaders in the Group of Seven major industrialized nations to discuss this international crisis. Macron tweeted that our house is literally burning with the Amazon rainforest that produces 20 per cent of Earth’s oxygen being on fire.