Canada Will Send Water Bombers and $15 Million to Help Fight Amazon Fires

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised his country's support to help putt out the Amazon fires.

“People around the world are shocked and devastated to see the Amazon engulfed in flames,” he said at a press conference during the end of the G7 Summit in France.

The Young PM said Canada is proposing to send water bombers and $15 million to help the affected areas. Trudeau also said that Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland had already "reached out to Foreign ministers in Brazil and Bolivia" to offer aid.

“We could pretend that the situation in the Amazon is just part of a natural cycle but that's not exactly what's going on here,” Trudeau said Monday. “The toll of human activity and extreme weather events on our communities, our environment, our health and our world will continue to climb unless we take decisive action.”

G7 country leaders have already applied pressure on the Brazilian government to react to the fires. Some of the countries -- which include Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States -- said they would halt a trade deal among the European Union and Brazil's economic and political bloc except the country takes action.

Other political and civil society leaders as well as celebrities all over the world have also called for an end to the devastation of the forest. The Amazon, often mentioned as "the planet's lungs," has been burning at a frightening rate this year -- the highest rate since 2013. More than one and a half soccer fields of Amazon rainforest are being devastated every single minute, according to Brazil's National Institute for Space Research.

And that's a big deal.

The Amazon is the biggest remaining tropical rainforest in the world. It is home to at least 10% of the world's biodiversity and yields 20% of the world's oxygen. It also helps control the temperature of the whole planet and without it, climate change could become irreparable.

“We believe that climate change is a real and existential threat to our planet and that's why as a country and as a government we have moved forward unequivocally in leadership on climate change,” Trudeau said.