Leaders of the Group of Seven wealthy nations will release more than $20 million of emergency aid to help countries battle wildfires in the Amazon rainforest, French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday.
However, it was not immediately clear if the country at the epicenter of the Amazon inferno, Brazil, would accept any help.
A record number of blazes are ravaging the world’s largest rainforest, many of them thought to have been started deliberately in Brazil, drawing international concern because of the Amazon’s importance to the global environment.
“We will straightaway offer Amazonian countries that signal to us their needs, financial support of at least up to 20 million euros ($22 million),” said Macron, who is locked in a war of words with Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro.
Macron last week accused Bolsonaro of lying about his environmental commitments, while the Brazilian leader has mocked the looks of the French leader’s 66-year-old wife.
Within minutes of the G7 move, Bolsonaro said Brazil was being treated like “a colony or no man’s land”, and denounced the creation of an international alliance to save the Amazon as an attack on his nation’s sovereignty.
