A Better Strategy for Saving the Amazon
By Iago Hairon, a program officer working on climate justice for the Open Society Latin America Program
The Amazon region is internationally famous for its rainforest, one of the most biodiverse places on earth. The Amazon rainforest absorbs more carbon than any other land region in the world and has long been central to international efforts to avoid the worst effects of the human-made climate crisis.
However, national governments, such as those in Brazil or Colombia, and international leaders, such as the ones from EU, and United States, for example, often forget about the vibrant urban communities that also exist within the Amazon. From Manaus and Bélem in Brazil to Leticia in Colombia or Iquitos in Peru, there are millions of Amazonian city dwellers who call the rainforest home.
Through the Open Society Foundations’ Latin America Program, we support solutions that center Amazonian urban populations and their importance in protecting the region. We believe local organizations and movements can bolster the preservation and restoration of the Amazon through actions at the local, state, and federal level directed at government actors, agribusiness, and the public, aiming to prevent the rainforest from reaching an irreversible tipping point.
In recent decades, efforts by philanthropic, nongovernmental, and multilateral organizations to protect the Amazon have focused on conservation efforts in the rainforest and at national level policy. Little effort was put into engaging Amazonian urban areas and their people, comprised mainly of Indigenous people and Afro-Descendants.
In Brazil, for example, which encompasses over 60 percent of the Amazon, the city of Belém alone has over 2 million inhabitants. The whole Brazilian Amazon has 29 million people, and 70 percent of the population [Portuguese]-live in metropolitan areas. Urban Amazonians, especially children, face high rates of respiratory disease due to the fine particulate matter contained in the smoke of forest fires, which also made many people more vulnerable during COVID-19 infections. Urban Amazonians, therefore, have many reasons to push for reforms that include adequate laws to prevent deforestation, improve sanitation, increasing city infrastructure to prevent harm against flooding, and stronger forest-fire prevention.
To understand Brazil’s situation at the current moment, it is helpful to look at the country’s history of climate policy and forest management. In the early 2000s, the country made great strides in protecting the Amazon rainforest-reducing deforestation by 82 percent from 2003 to 2012. However, it started rising again in 2013; and by 2020, Brazil’s deforestation in the Amazon surged, hitting a dramatic 12-year high. The backsliding came shortly after President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration issued a series of anti-environmental policies, which undermined existing forest conservation and indigenous rights policies and participation in decision-making.
Currently, Brazil’s federal government is not a helpful partner concerning forest protection. Instead, then, a better strategy is to engage with Amazon states and its cities, where most of the population is living. Across Amazon cities, there are diverse and vibrant civil society movements mobilizing to stop deforestation and to secure inclusive social and economic policies, such as Kanindé Association, NOSSAS, IMAZON, and Comitê Chico Mendes. Indeed, as Alana Manchineri, a young Indigenous woman from the northwestern Brazilian state of Acre, recently told me, “Black and Indigenous youth have a tremendous power to influence decision-makers and mobilize schools and universities to protect the Amazon Rainforest.”
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