Joel Puyanawa is standing in a clearing near the Moa River, which cuts through the Amazon rainforest in western Brazil. Behind him is a thick canopy of trees creating a typical Amazonian tableau – one that almost was not.
Puyanawa is the chief of the Puyanawa Indigenous Peoples, whose traditional territory had for generations been diced up and deforested, including by the notoriously brutal rubber barons of the colonial era.
But in recent years, the Puyanawa have regained control over their lands, largely ending the clear cutting ravaging much of the Amazon. Instead, the Puyanawa have turned to farming, using traditional practices, like dotting their fields with hardwood trees, to ease the burden on the land.
“There’s extra work, yes,” says Puyanawa. “But it’s exactly to preserve what’s most sacred. If we cut down a forest, it will never recover.”
Some 93 per cent of Puyanawa territory is forested. While the area lost about 50 football pitches of tree cover from 2018 to 2022, this remains much less compared to many parts of the Amazon.
Observers say Puyanawa’s success is a possible antidote to the unchecked resource extraction that is decimating the world’s tropical forests and could serve as a model for other communities looking to balance sustainability with economic development.
“The work of the Puyanawa shows what is possible when Indigenous Peoples are able to exercise their rights to their traditional territories,” said Gabriel Labbate, the head of the Climate Mitigation Unit at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). “The Puyanawa are proving that sustainability and economic growth can go hand in hand.”
UNEP, in collaboration with The Amazon Environmental Research Institute, is helping Acre incentivize efforts to reduce deforestation and forest degradation. This includes providing technical assistance designed to help the state access climate financing.
One of Acre’s key moves was to launch in 2010 the State System of Incentives for Environmental Services, which aims to compensate communities for protecting, restoring and sustainably managing forests. That made Acre the first jurisdiction in the world to implement a large-scale program dedicated to rewarding forest action through financial incentives.
As part of that effort, Acre receives funding from development organizations for keeping trees in the ground, crucial to countering climate change. (Globally, 11 per cent of all greenhouse gases come from deforestation, more than all modes of transport combined.) About 70 per cent of the climate-linked funding goes to communities, like the Puyanawa, to support sustainable development. Acre is also planning to sell carbon credits on the international markets, with a large portion of those proceeds expected to benefit communities.
“Indigenous Peoples play a very important role in balancing the climate and preserving forests by being guardians,” says Francisca Arara, the head of Acre’s Indigenous Peoples Secretariat. “We provide a service not just for our territories but for the world.”
The work to protect the Amazon, home to one of the greatest concentrations of life on the planet, is not only helping to counter climate change. It is supporting the targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a global agreement to protect and restore the natural world. The plan calls on countries to, among other things, respect the rights of Indigenous Peoples and reduce the impact of climate change on biodiversity.
The Puyanawa’s efforts to protect and restore forests are expected to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 6,400 tonnes annually, the equivalent of taking almost 1,400 cars off the road. Observers also say it can be a model for other parts of the Amazon. Almost 50 million people live in the region – including 830,000 people in Acre state – and many depend on forests for their livelihoods, including 1 million Indigenous Peoples. But between 2018 and 2022, the Brazilian Amazon lost more than 5 million hectares of forest due to reduced protections and policies favoring agricultural expansion.
