Brazil’s burning rainforest is the world’s problem

The 2,500 wildfires now ravaging Brazil’s Amazon rainforest are not only an environmental disaster of historic proportions in that country, they’re a grave threat to the entire planet.

If there has ever been a time for a new kind of concerted, co-ordinated international response to what is clearly an international crisis, it is now. So far, it’s not coming. But the incineration of this environmental treasure could prove the tipping point.

As you read this, a region that has been called “the lungs of the world” is choking on smoke. While forest fires are, in fact, a natural annual occurrence in the region, the situation has never been so bad. This year has witnessed 84 per cent more wildfires in Brazil than in 2018. And they carry a stark warning.

As it pumps massive quantities of carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, Brazil’s burning rainforest is fuelling changes to the planet’s climate that are resulting in more killer heat waves, more destructive floods, more expanding deserts and, yes, more wildfires.

In addition, the fewer trees that grow in this rainforest, the less carbon dioxide it absorbs and the less effective it becomes as a weapon against greenhouse gas emissions. To make matters worse, most of the 41,600 fires that have been turning vast tracts of the planet’s largest rainforest into embers and ash this year were deliberately set by farmers trying to clear new land for cultivation. This unnatural catastrophe was avoidable.

Yet far from trying to reverse the trend in Amazonian deforestation, Brazil’s autocratic president, Jair Bolsonaro, has encouraged it as a way to grow the country’s economy. Not only has his government proved incapable of extinguishing the current conflagration, it has wilfully obstructed international efforts to save this environmental treasure. If that’s not a crime, it should be.

Only belatedly, and after denouncing it as an affront to Brazilian sovereignty, did Bolsonaro accept the offer of $20 million in assistance from the Group of Seven countries. Granted, that sum is too meagre to make a real difference. But it signals a growing acceptance that multinational action is both necessary and justified when the environmental problems of one nation spill over its borders.

For decades, the United Nations has sent peacekeeping forces into countries and regions torn by military conflicts. No, those blue-helmeted troops have not succeeded in stopping all wars, everywhere. However, they have time and again preserved tense ceasefires, prepared the ground for lasting peace and, in so doing, saved countless lives.

Why can’t the UN create international brigades of green-helmeted eco-forces of comparable size and with comparable resources to enable environmental peace? The UN is holding a climate change conference in mid September. That offers the perfect opportunity to explore a possibility dreamed of for decades.

Countries such as Brazil might be more receptive to such a broad, multilateral response than to the entreaties of G7 members like the United States, which it perceives as rich, powerful and bullying. Nor should international efforts be confined to stopping the wildfires and ending the immediate crisis. International experts could work with Brazil’s often impoverished farmers to promote more sustainable agricultural practices.

While the Canadian government has generously offered $15 million to help Brazil, it can do more. It should signal that while it will continue its current trade talks with Brazil, signing a deal would be difficult if Brazil won’t do more to protect its rainforest.

We’re all neighbours in the same hemisphere. We’re all citizens of the same world.