Blackened tree trunks lay smoldering on the charred ground as thick smoke chokes the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, a scene of devastation that is being repeated across the "lungs of the planet."

In the northwestern state of Rondonia -- one of the hardest hit areas by the worst fires in years -- people are living under a blanket of smoke that has enveloped the remote region.

"I've lived here for 20 years and I've seen a lot of fires, but this smoke in recent days, I've never seen anything like that before," Welis da Claiana, 25, told AFP in the capital Porto Velho.

"The smoke has affected 100 percent of our daily lives. We wake up tired from breathing the smoke."

Da Claiana says the fires in recent days had even threatened the car hire company where she works and forced the cancellation of flights at the local airport.

"Visibility was horrible, no one could do anything," she said, blaming "big farmers" for the blazes.

At one point, the fires began closing in on her home. She shut the doors and windows in an attempt to keep out the smoke, but she still ended up having to rush her daughter to the hospital after she began having difficulty breathing.

A colleague was also hospitalized with respiratory problems.

The cause of the air pollution can be found a short drive from the city of half a million people: multiple fires devouring sections of forest that have been cleared to make way for cattle or crops.

Seen from above, the destruction is dramatic: walls of bright orange flames advance across the expansive forest as huge plumes of black smoke billow into the sky.

Swathes of forest have been stripped of vegetation in apparent preparation for burning. AFP journalists traveling by road and air in the state bordering Bolivia have seen others on fire or already burned to a crisp.

In some places, a single tree has been left standing, surrounded by scorched earth -- a testament to the destruction of a forest the WWF says is home to hundreds of threatened animal and plant species.

More than half of the 79,513 fires recorded in Brazil this year are in the Amazon, and 1,130 were started between Friday and Saturday.

"It's increasing every year," Eliana Amorim said in Porto Velho, blaming deforestation for the fires.

"But people's awareness is not."

G7 to help nations hit by Amazon fires: Macron
Biarritz, France (AFP) Aug 25, 2019 - World leaders at the G7 summit have agreed to help the countries affected by the huge wildfires ravaging the Amazon rainforest as soon as possible , French President Emmanuel Macron said Sunday.

"We are all agreed on helping those countries which have been hit by the fires as fast as possible," he told journalists at the summit in the southwestern French resort of Biarritz.

Ahead of the gathering, Macron called on world leaders to hold urgent talks on the wildfires ripping through the world's largest rainforest, pledging "concrete measures" to tackle it.

Although about 60 percent of the Amazon is in Brazil, the vast forest also takes in parts of eight other countries: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela.

"This morning, Colombia called on the international community (to help), so we must help out," he said.

"Our teams are making contact with all the Amazon countries so we can finalise some very concrete commitments involving technical resources and funding."

Macron's bid to put the Amazon crisis high on the agenda at the G7 angered Brazil's far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro, who lashed out over what he sees as outside interference, denouncing the French leader's "colonialist mentality".

Pope fears for Amazon, the planet's 'vital lung'
Vatican City (AFP) Aug 25, 2019 - Pope Francis on Sunday voiced concern for the Amazon rainforest, a "vital" lung for the planet, as the worst blazes in years have sparked a global outcry.

"We are concerned about the vast fires that have developed in the Amazon," the pope told the faithful at the Vatican.

"That forest lung is vital for our planet."

He urged the world's 1.3 billion Catholics to pray for the fires to be extinguished as quickly as possible.

Official figures show 78,383 forest fires have been recorded in Brazil this year, the highest number of any year since 2013.

The Argentine pope, who will gather bishops for a conference on the Amazon in October, met Brazilian indigenous leader Raoni in 2013 when he toured Europe warning of the dangers of deforestation.

The pope denounced the exploitation of the Amazon by "huge international economic interests" in a 2015 encyclical.

In January 2018 he visited Puerto Maldonado village in the Amazonian jungle of southeastern Peru where thousands of tribespeople had gathered, including from neighbouring Brazil and Bolivia.

The Catholic church acknowledges the bloody history of the spread of Christianity through South America and that it has not always respected Amazon tribes. Today it is committed to numerous projects to support indigenous populations.

Related Links
Forest and Wild Fires - News, Science and Technology

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Amazon fires: how celebrities are spreading disinformation
Rio De Janeiro (AFP) Aug 23, 2019
Many high-profile figures seeking to denounce the fires in the Amazon - from Madonna and Cristiano Ronaldo to Leonardo DiCaprio and Emmanuel Macron - have unwittingly ended up misleading millions on social media, either sharing photographs of the region that are years old or images taken in other parts of the world. Official figures show nearly 73,000 forest fires were recorded in Brazil in the first eight months of the year, the highest number for any year since 2013. Most were in the Amazon. ... read more