Banks are funding forest destruction across the world, often lighting the touchpaper that turns into raging, devastating fires.
Watch this astonishing story from Paula, a wildlife rescuer on the frontlines of the burning Pantanal region of Brazil.
Warning: graphic animal content.
‘Every fire season, our team ages ten years’
Smoke for breakfast, smoke for dinner. Smoke is an unpleasant certainty in the daily lives of anyone living in northern Brazil, especially at this time of year. The constant firefighting and dangerous rescue missions take their toll on all who try to help.
In this video, we hear from Paula, a wildlife rescuer in the Brazilian Pantanal, as she battles to rescue the region’s incredible animals from the flames.
Year after year, the Amazon region is deforested and burned to make way for livestock grazing. But in 2024, illegal man-made fires reached an unprecedented scale, affecting many different regions of Brazil, and bringing death and destruction across the country.
In the Pantanal, the largest inland wetland on the planet, the number of fire hotspots from January to August reached 9167, a shocking 2174% increase compared to the same eight months of last year.
Paula shows us what it’s really like on the frontlines of a land on fire – saving wildlife in an endless, devastating battle against an inferno swallowing huge swathes of nature.
These fires aren’t natural or inevitable. They are the consequence of massive banks and financial corporations funding companies hellbent on destroying nature for profit.
Support us to pressure governments meeting at the COP16 Biodiversity meeting in Colombia, to hold these destructive companies to account.
Send a message of hope for nature
You may not be able to go to the COP16 Biodiversity meeting in Colombia. But your voice can be carried, projected in a video, along with thousands of others from around the world, to show world leaders that we demand nature protection.