Earth Alliance, an environmental organization co-founded by Leonardo DiCaprio, has declared that it will donate $5m to help resist the fires currently destroying the Amazon rainforest.
Earth Alliance will donate the funds to social activists and native associations as they strive to preserve the Amazon. The National Institute for Space Research in Brazil states there have been more than 72,000 fires in the Amazon rainforest this year.
“The burning of the Amazon rainforest is discharging carbon dioxide into the atmosphere quickly, damaging an ecosystem that absorbs millions of tonnes of carbon discharges every year and is one of the planet’s greatest resistance against climate change,” says the Earth Alliance website.
DiCaprio declared the support package on Instagram and said: “The lungs of the Earth are in fires. The Brazilian Amazon – home to 1 million Indigenous people and 3 million species – has been burning for more than two weeks straight.”
Leonardo DiCaprio Donates $5m
Oscar winning hollywood actor also supported set up Earth Alliance with the billionaires Laurene Powell Jobs and Brian Sheth. At a G7 summit conference on the environment, which Donald Trump did not attend, French president, Emmanuel Macron, confirmed that the association had invested $20m of their own to fight the fires.
Most of the fires are supposed to have been set by farmers and herdsmen, with the implicit consent of Brazil’s anti-environmentalist president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has decreased environmental protections.
If the fires are not restrained the results could be terrible, authorities warn, not only for the people who call the rainforest home but for the entire planet.
