Canada Will Send Water Bombers and $15 Million to Help Fight Amazon Fires

Canadian Prime Minister
Justin Trudeau has promised his country's support to help putt out the Amazon
fires.

“People around the world are
shocked and devastated to see the Amazon engulfed in flames,” he said at a press
conference during the end of the G7 Summit in France.

The Young PM said Canada is proposing
to send water bombers and $15 million to help the affected areas. Trudeau also said
that Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland had already
"reached out to Foreign ministers in Brazil and Bolivia" to offer
aid.

“We could pretend that the
situation in the Amazon is just part of a natural cycle but that's not exactly
what's going on here,” Trudeau said Monday. “The toll of human activity and
extreme weather events on our communities, our environment, our health and our
world will continue to climb unless we take decisive action.”

G7 country leaders have
already applied pressure on the Brazilian government to react to the fires.
Some of the countries -- which include Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan,
the United Kingdom and the United States -- said they would halt a trade deal among the
European Union and Brazil's economic and political bloc except the country
takes action.

Other political and civil
society leaders as well as celebrities all over the world have also called for an end to the devastation of the
forest. The Amazon, often mentioned as "the planet's lungs," has
been burning at a frightening rate this year -- the highest rate since 2013.
More than one and a half soccer fields of Amazon rainforest are being devastated
every single minute, according to Brazil's National Institute for Space
Research.

And that's a big deal.

The Amazon is the biggest remaining tropical rainforest in the
world. It is home to at least 10% of the world's biodiversity and yields
20% of the world's oxygen. It also helps control the temperature of the whole
planet and without it, climate change could become irreparable.

“We believe that climate
change is a real and existential threat to our planet and that's why as a
country and as a government we have moved forward unequivocally in leadership
on climate change,” Trudeau said.