Brazil’s new amazon strategy links poverty reduction to forest protection through community-centered conservation

Deep in Brazil’s western Amazon, the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve demonstrates how forest conservation and human livelihoods can work hand in hand. Named after the rubber tapper and labor leader killed in 1988 for defending sustainable forest use, the reserve showcases families who tap rubber, harvest Brazil nuts, and farm small plots without destroying large swaths of rainforest.

This community-centered approach is now becoming the cornerstone of Brazil’s evolving conservation strategy. The Amazon Region Protected Areas (ARPA) program, which oversees 120 protected areas spanning over 60 million hectares—an area roughly the size of Madagascar—is shifting focus from simply expanding protected zones to directly supporting the people who live within them. Between 2008 and 2020, ARPA-supported areas showed significantly lower deforestation rates than comparable regions, helping prevent massive carbon emissions.

The program’s new phase, called ARPA Comunidades, represents a fundamental change in conservation philosophy. About half of ARPA’s protected areas are sustainable-use reserves where communities live and work inside the forest. Previously, these residents benefited only indirectly from conservation funding. Now, Brazil is betting that directly supporting these forest-dependent communities—providing them with economic opportunities tied to forest preservation—will create stronger, more sustainable protection for the Amazon.

“We were missing closer attention to the communities living in these sustainable-use conservation units,” explained Fernanda Marques of FUNBIO, the Brazilian nonprofit managing the initiative. This approach echoes Chico Mendes’ original argument: forests are best protected when people can make a decent living from keeping them intact.