See the forest

Fire in a reserve in Novo Progresso (Brazil) in mid-August.CARL DE SOUZA / AFP

The covid-19 pandemic has overshadowed matters of enormous gravity, such as the fight against climate change and especially a chapter that is going to have a direct impact on the planet's oxygen, which are the fires in the Amazon rainforest and negative management from the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro.

According to official data, fires have grown 13% so far this year compared to 2019 in the world's largest rainforest, the worst wave of fires in a decade.

Further south, in the Pantanal, the largest wetland on the planet and one of the most diverse ecosystems, fire has already devastated a quarter of the territory in the most severe wave in its history.

Eight European countries and more than 200 companies and NGOs around the world have just warned the Brazilian Government of the economic consequences of what is happening.

And, in an attempt to focus an issue that is currently out of focus, the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, proposed in the recent presidential debate in the US a fund of 20,000 million to fight against deforestation in the Amazon.

His words, like every time a foreign leader speaks, angered Bolsonaro.

The difference is that if a year ago those of Emmanuel Macron made the news, this time the issue is in the background.

But the truth is that the president of Brazil has the worst possible record in the face of the greatest planetary challenge: the Government has reduced the funds allocated to environmental prevention and surveillance;

impunity for fires (usually caused by farmers, miners or ranchers who want to exploit the land) has grown;

controls against deforestation have been lowered, and Parliament has plans to vote a broad amnesty for squatters.

The situation also affects the health of indigenous peoples, in whom greater respiratory problems have been registered due to the fires, adding a new risk to the expansion of the coronavirus.

On the one hand, therefore, stands a Bolsonaro who questions climate change - in addition to the severity of covid-19, even though he himself suffered from it - and on the other an international community now focused on the fight against the virus and recession.

But this international community has its weapons and must act: at risk is the EU-Mercosur trade agreement, a powerful lever in the hands of the Union for Brazil to reinforce its environmental policy;

business with demanding countries with climate change, and the aspiration to join the OECD.

All actors must implement their strategies to defend the Amazon, the lung of the world, from a management blind to environmental necessity.

It is not going to be that the pandemic does not let us see the forest.