Protecting the Rainforest is an Amazonian Task—and the World’s Environment Depends on it
The Amazon rainforest stands alone among Earth’s biomes for its size, diversity, and critical importance to environmental health. Home to 10 percent of the world’s species, the Amazon basin also contains some 20 percent of our liquid fresh water and covers 2.7 million square miles—close to half of South America’s land mass.1 Historically, the Amazon has also functioned as an enormous carbon sink for the entire planet: as of 2022, it was estimated that the region’s trees contain over 60 billion tons of carbon.2 At the same time, the Amazon Basin is a vibrant cultural region, home to some 21 million people—nearly the population of Florida—in the Brazilian Amazon alone.3 Indeed, the Amazon’s cultures often support its role in the global environment. Between 2001 and 2021, it is estimated that lands managed by Indigenous peoples in the Amazon Basin were net carbon sinks on the order of nearly 400 million tons of carbon, or roughly the equivalent of the United Kingdom’s annual fossil fuel emissions.4
The Amazon, however, has struggled in the 21st century, as deforestation, resource extraction, and drug trafficking threaten the region’s stability. By 2021, researchers calculated that certain parts of the Amazon in eastern and southeastern Brazil were net contributors to the world’s carbon levels,5 driven largely by forest fires and increased drought conditions, which impair trees’ ability to sequester carbon.6 Indirect impacts are also multiplying, as forest cover in the Basin has decreased by around 17 percent over the past four decades, due largely to increased agricultural demand, which has been concentrated in the resource-intensive, high-emissions practice of raising beef cattle, which are an invasive species in the Western Hemisphere.7 At the same time, the Amazon Basin has been the site of intensive resource extraction over the last half century. This is especially true in the Ecuadorian Amazon, where Texaco began searching for oil and natural gas in 1967, leading not only to the increased emissions associated with fossil fuels, but also a loss of biodiversity and irreparable cultural harm to the Indigenous Huaroni people.8 Compounding matters, much of the increased tax revenue went toward the construction of roads and expansion of ranching.9 Tying all of these various threads together is the explosion in illicit drug trafficking over the past several years. Major coca-growing operations have emerged deep in the Amazon, near the tripoint border of Brazil, Peru, and Columbia, utilizing the Amazon and its tributaries to ferry processed cocaine to markets in coastal Brazil and around the world.10 In addition to the obvious negative effects of the drug trade and the deforestation caused by coca production, the proceeds from the cocaine trade are often laundered into the dredging, mining, and agricultural operations that contribute most to the degradation of the Amazon Basin.11 In some parts of Brazil, crime syndicates have fully seized air strips to evade government controls while exporting drugs and illicitly-mined resources, especially gold.12
The myriad challenges facing the Amazon Rainforest and its communities are, in a word, intertwined, and facing them requires a multipronged approach that balances the needs of an almost impossibly diverse set of stakeholders. Among the groups tackling these challenges is Amazon Watch, an Oakland, CA, based organization that has staff on the ground in Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru, in addition to the United States.13 Amazon Watch’s overarching goal is to end destruction of the Amazon Rainforest and its adjacent ecosystems,14 fighting overdevelopment and destructive industries, while working alongside Indigenous peoples in the region to advance environmental conservation and supporting the people who live there.15
Much of Amazon Watch’s work comes in the form of directed research, utilizing its resources and expertise to provide deep dives on critical topics and constructing road maps on how to address them. For instance, in June of 2025, Amazon Watch released a report on the state of crude oil exploration, particularly in Ecuador.16 That nation holds the distinction of being one of the few, if not the only, countries to decide by popular vote to leave its enormous oil reserves untapped.17 Nevertheless, this popular will has come into tension with Ecuador’s political leadership, which has signaled an interest in expanding the country’s fossil fuel production, presenting a challenge to activists and voters alike.18 Staying in Ecuador, Amazon Watch partnered with numerous Indigenous organizations to publish a report in September of 2024 on the state of mining and organized crime in the nation and their impact on Indigenous communities.19 As with the subsequent report on oil extraction in Ecuador, Amazon Watch and its partners have identified opportunities for cooperation and collaboration between the various governance entities in Ecuador.20 The case is similar in Peru, according to a May, 2025, report on the impacts of the illicit drug trade on the county and its Indigenous peoples.21 As in Ecuador, a hyper-capitalist environment has led to not only environmental disasters, but also an ongoing breakdown of governance structures across Peru.22 And, as in Ecuador and across the Amazon Basin, Amazon Watch and its research partners have proposed solutions and structures to protect the Amazon Rainforest, its people, and the ecosystems they support—solutions which they are prepared to help implement with their team of lawyers and other staffers.
In sum, the Amazon Rainforest is a uniquely important and vulnerable ecosystem, and protecting it smartly requires a commensurately unique set of solutions. Amazon Watch, partnering with Indigenous communities and other local stakeholders to develop and implement those solutions, is a major part of the movement to protect this environment and its peoples. It is a critical effort with both local and global implications in the years ahead.
1 https://www.worldwildlife.org/places/amazon
2 https://apnews.com/article/amazon-carbon-climate-change-deforestation- 1bc52c85c90dd4c8b04de4c8cd77394e (56.8 billion metric tonnes is equal to 62.6 billion short tons)
3 https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/places-we-protect/amazon-rainforest
4 https://www.wri.org/insights/amazon-carbon-sink-indigenous-forests (340 million tonnes is equal to 374.8 million short tons)
5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03629-6
6 Id.; https://research.noaa.gov/deforestation-warming-flip-part-of-amazon-forest-from-carbon-sink-tosource
7 Id.; https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/amazon-beef-deforestation-brazil; https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ppp3.10441#:~:text=Beef%20cattle%20in%20Brazil%20 were,commodities%20for%20the%20Brazilian%20economy
8 https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/amazon/amazon_threats/other_threats/oil_ and_gas_extraction_amazon
9 Id.
10 https://www.wri.org/insights/nature-crime-amazon-deforestation; https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/02/18/in-the-amazon-the-cocaine-rivers-plague-theregion_6738274_4.html
11 https://www.wri.org/insights/nature-crime-amazon-deforestation
12 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/28/organized-crime-drives-environmental-amazondevastation
13 https://amazonwatch.org/about/contact
14 https://amazonwatch.org/work#stop
15 https://amazonwatch.org/work#solutions
16 https://amazonwatch.org/assets/files/2025-drilling-toward-disaster.pdf
17 Id.; https://amazonwatch.org/news/2025/0617-drilling-toward-disaster
18 Id
19 https://amazonwatch.org/assets/files/2024-09-gold-gangs-and-governance.pdf
20 https://amazonwatch.org/news/2024/0910-gold-gangs-and-governance-indigenous-communities-in-thegrip-of-organized-crime
21 https://amazonwatch.org/assets/files/2025-05-drug-trafficking-in-peru.pdf
22 Id.; https://amazonwatch.org/news/2025/0528-drug-trafficking-in-indigenous-territories-of-the-peruvianamazon