VANCOUVER—A researcher who has spent decades working in the Amazon rainforest with Indigenous Peoples says sending water bombers to Brazil would be a mere Band-Aid in the face of systemic problems.

Late last week, Brazil’s National Space Research Institute revealed that a total of 76,720 wildfires have burned across the country this year; a little over half were in the Amazon region. The institute says it doesn’t have figures for the area burned, but deforestation as a whole has accelerated in the Amazon this year.

On Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged $15 million and the use of Canadian water bombers to help combat the ongoing fires.

Barbara Zimmerman is the director of the Kayapo Project at the International Conservation Fund of Canada, a charity that aims to preserve biodiverse areas around the world. Though she applauds the Trudeau government’s announcement and his efforts to bring more attention to the Amazon fires, she says the measures are short-term solutions.

“The entire problem is the lack of enforcement of Brazil’s laws, and as long as that continues, this will happen every year,” said Zimmerman, who is based in Toronto.

Critics like Zimmerman say the large number of fires has been stoked by the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, who has encouraged farmers, loggers and ranchers to strip away the forest. Facing international pressure, Bolsonaro has now vowed to protect the area.

Fires in the rainforest are mostly man-made, said Zimmerman, contrary to Canadian forest fires, which are mostly natural during dry seasons. Last year, B.C. saw more than 2,100 wildfires burn a record-breaking 1.35 million hectares of land. Most were sparked by lightning, but roughly a quarter were started by people.

In the Amazon forest, naturally occurring wildfires are rare because the trees and vegetation hold an enormous amount of “living biomass” or water that lessens the chance of fire, even in the dry season, according to Zimmerman.

“The idea of sending water bombers comes from a very Canadian experience, but it’s not the relevant experience in Brazil,” she said.

Based on his experience supporting firefighting efforts in Australia, Blaine Wiggins, president of the Aboriginal Firefighters Association of Canada, said sending water bombers can “augment” efforts in countries that don’t have robust firefighting resources.

“Most aerial tankers are not necessarily used to put fires out but just slow the advance of fire so the ground crew can secure the perimeter ... and once they get control of it, then they can move to extinguish it,” said Wiggins.

Brazilian military planes began dumping water on fires in the Amazon state of Rondonia over the weekend, and a few hundred troops deployed to the fire zone. But many Brazilians took to the streets in Rio de Janeiro and other cities Sunday to demand the administration do more.

After taking office on Jan. 1, Bolsonaro transferred responsibility for delineating Indigenous territories from the justice ministry to the agriculture ministry, which one Brazilian lawmaker described as “letting the fox take over the chicken coop.”

“The new Brazilian government has essentially weakened their environmental enforcement agency, their ministry of environment, to the point that it can’t go to the Amazon and enforce the laws. Given the first steps he’s taken as president, which is to weaken the federal authorities’ power to enforce the Constitution, to enforce Indigenous rights. So he’s taken ministries that were already fairly weak politically (and) weakened them even further,” Zimmerman said.

Zimmerman has worked with the Indigenous Kayapo people, who live in a stretch of land within the northern state of Para, for three decades. The state is one of the regions most affected by the forest fires.

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The Kayapo Indigenous lands have not been affected by fires in part due to monitoring support from international NGOs, Zimmerman said. But they are facing greater pressure from what she calls illegal logging, ranching and mining backed by Bolsonaro’s government.

Bolsonaro has argued that protection for Indigenous lands and nature reserves are helping choke Brazil’s now-struggling economy by stifling its major agricultural and mining sectors. He has expressed a desire to protect the environment “but without creating difficulties for our progress.”

Zimmerman is now pressing Canada’s government to consider diplomatic pressures, starting with trade sanctions against Brazil.

With files from The Associated Press, The Canadian Press and Ainslie Cruickshank

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