Save the Amazon! Save the world. Save Ourselves. Save our Species. S.O.S.

Article issued by Ignace Schops, EUROPARC President

This is a message to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and to all the world leaders. This is a message to prioritize the topic of the burning Amazon at the UN Climate Action Summit to be held September 23 in New York.

Please consider declaring a global state of emergency! We are reaching the dangerous tipping points much earlier causing unprecedented environmental and humanitarian disasters. Like I stated before, it is time to set up the UN Green Helmets to save our planet.

Time after time, experts are flabbergasted of the results of their research. Dangerously fast we will face tipping points and feedback loops we cannot control. Report after report, the IPCC (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) admits the situation is worse than they predicted in the former report.

The world is on fire!

The Arctic is known for its icy expanses, frozen tundra, and massive floating glaciers. Not blazing wildfires. Last month, megafires razed the northernmost parts of Russia and Greenland. And now the Amazon is burning.

Environmental organizations and researchers say the wildfires blazing in the Brazilian rainforest are 80% higher than last year and were set to fire to clear and utilize the land, emboldened by the country’s pro-business policy.

Please notice there is no business to be done on a dead planet.

The Amazon, with a surface of 10 times the size of France, delivers the oxygen we need, regulates a comfortable climate to live and is one of our global biodiversity hotspots. The consequences of the fire are tremendously dangerous.

Local and global. Currently, the fire hit a surface as big as Belgium and it is ongoing! As a consequence of this fire, the Amazon ecosystem can be deregulated and reach a tipping point where the moisture of the Amazon is not able anymore to create clouds, to produce rain. If this happens, we don’t need fires to diminish the forest. The drought will do the rest.

The Amazon is our green lung, providing oxygen and a big carbon sink.

Just 12% of the Amazon has a some kind of protection status. Imagine just 12% of your lungs were secured to keep you healthy and day after day you inhale smoggier oxygen in a smaller part of our lungs.

What would you do?

Correct, you would do everything to improve our situation. To get healthy again. At any cost, because we want to stay alive.

So please. We need action and we need it now! We need to protect what keeps us alive.

Save the Amazon! Save the world. Save Ourselves. Save our Species.

S.O.S.