Various news outlets have noted that both the Australian and Amazon tragedies were related to climate change but failed to describe a key difference between them: the fires in Australia are almost exclusively wildfires, while those that ravaged the Brazilian Amazon were intentionally set by people, primarily for land speculation and agribusiness.

The Amazon fires were criminal acts inspired by President Bolsonaro’s anti-environmental rhetoric. Land speculators, farmers, and ranchers understood the president’s message as a license to commit arson with impunity in order to aggressively expand their operations into the rainforest.

The devastation in Australia and the Brazilian rainforest are implicitly connected, and we have a collective obligation to address the root causes of climate change and avoid the next global climate disaster.