Nations offer aid to Brazil for recovery from Amazon fires
RIO DE JANEIRO — Leaders of the Group of Seven nations said Sunday they were preparing to help Brazil fight the fires burning across the Amazon and repair the damage even as tens of thousands of soldiers were being deployed to fight the blazes that have caused global alarm.
French President Emmanuel Macron said the summit leaders were nearing an agreement on how to support Brazil and said the agreement would involve both technical and financial mechanisms “so that we can help them in the most effective way possible.”
Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel said her country and others will talk with Brazil about reforestation in the Amazon once fires there have been extinguished.
Pope Francis also added his voice to the chorus of concern over the fires in Brazil, which borders his homeland of Argentina, and urged people to pray so that “they are controlled as quickly as possible.”
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Friday sent 44,000 soldiers to help battle the fires that are scattered across his nation’s share of the vast Amazon, an overall region ten times the size of Texas that is seen as a global bulwark against climate change.
The country’s satellite monitoring agency has recorded more than 41,000 fires in the Amazon region so far this year. Experts say most of the fires are set by farmers or ranchers clearing existing farmland. But the same monitoring agency has reported a sharp increase in deforestation this year as well.
Marcelo De Souza is an Associated Press writer.