Brazil VP challenges DiCaprio to a hike in the jungle

Mourao, who heads President Jair Bolsonaro’s job pressure on preventing deforestation, took situation with DiCaprio reposting an Instagram video from The Guardian newspaper with photos of the world’s largest rainforest in flames.

“I might like to ask our most up-to-date critic, the actor Leonardo DiCaprio, to come back with me to Sao Gabriel da Cachoeira (in northern Brazil) and stroll eight hours by the jungle,” Mourao mentioned at an occasion on sustainable improvement within the Amazon organized by the Nationwide Industrial Confederation (CNI).

“He’ll get a greater understanding of how issues work on this immense area.”

DiCaprio, an outspoken environmentalist, shared The Guardian’s put up on his personal Instagram account Friday.

The accompanying caption cited satellite tv for pc knowledge from Brazil’s area company, INPE, displaying the variety of fires within the Brazilian Amazon in July elevated 28 % year-on-year, with early numbers for August additionally displaying a rise.

“Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, is beneath strain internationally to curb the fires, however he has publicly doubted the severity of them up to now claiming opponents and indigenous communities had been accountable,” mentioned the put up.

Bolsonaro has confronted worldwide condemnation for presiding over rising deforestation and big fires within the Amazon final 12 months.

The far-right chief has downplayed the problem, saying final week that “this story that the Amazon is burning is a lie.”

However he’s additionally eager to keep away from a repeat of final 12 months’s worldwide outcry.

In July, he decreed a 120-day ban on the agricultural fires utilized by farmers and ranchers to clear their fields with the slash-and-burn methodology — the principle explanation for fires within the Amazon, in accordance with consultants.

And he has deployed the military to the area forward of this 12 months’s hearth season, which is getting beneath method.

Mourao claims the insurance policies are working.

He was fast to play up the truth that deforestation within the Brazilian Amazon decreased 36 % in July 2020 from the report stage of July 2019.

Nonetheless, the identical knowledge additionally present that deforestation elevated 34.5 % year-on-year within the 12 months by July.

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