Natural resource production chains in the Amazon - such as cupuaçu and açaí fruits and pirarucu fish - will receive investments of BRL 96.6 million through the Forests and Communities: Living Amazon program, announced on Tuesday (Dec. 9) in Brasília.

The initiative by the National Supply Company (Conab) will be carried out with resources from the Amazon Fund and with support from the Ministries of the Environment and Climate Change and Agrarian Development and Family Farming.

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The program will be implemented over two years with the aim of expanding the supply of forest products to the consumer market, diversifying the regional menu through the National School Feeding Program (PNAE), and increasing the supply of foods originating from socio-biodiversity and family farming to the Food Acquisition Program (PAA).

“It is a legacy that we in the Brazilian government need to leave to the forest peoples. Socio-biodiversity products need to be promoted and deserve the visibility that other products important to Brazil’s economy have,” said Conab President João Edegar Pretto.

The initiative will cover 32 projects from cooperatives and associations in the Legal Amazon region, bringing together foresters, aquaculturists, extractivists, artisanal fishers, indigenous peoples, and quilombola communities.

Each proposal may receive investments of up to BRL 2.5 million for the acquisition of equipment and infrastructure aimed at boosting the commercialization of forest products in consumer markets.

The funds will be transferred to the program by the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES), which manages the Amazon Fund. According to BNDES’ socio-environmental director, Tereza Campello, the investment was made possible by a major effort to reduce deforestation and restructure the fund’s resources, allowing for investments that will total BRL 2.2 billion in 2025.

“This Conab initiative represents almost BRL 100 million for a strategic agenda that will reach our communities and also enable a platform where we will have all the socio-biodiversity data available in the Amazon in a professional and organized manner,” concluded Tereza Campello.

Of the 68,000 hectares logged in Amazonas, 42,000 lacked authorization from environmental agencies, according to a survey released on Friday (Nov. 5) by the Imazon research institute. This means that 62 percent of the state’s timber-harvested area is illegal.

Conducted annually by Rede Simex - composed of three environmental organizations: ICV, Imaflora, and Imazon - the survey mapped logging in Amazonas using satellite images and cross-referenced them with permits issued by environmental agencies, covering the period from August 2023 to July 2024.

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Compared to the previous survey (August 2022–July 2023), when 38,000 hectares were logged without authorization, there was a 9 percent increase in the area of illegal logging.

Camila Damasceno, a researcher with Imazon’s Amazon Monitoring Program, says the increase is extremely worrying, as illegal logging ends up financing other environmental crimes, such as burning and deforestation.

“In addition, it harms the legal timber market, which removes trees through sustainable forest management and generates jobs and taxes for Amazonas,” she added.

In terms of authorized logging, Amazonas went from 11,300 hectares from August 2022 to July 2023 to 26,100 hectares from August 2023 to July 2024, a 131 percent increase.

Boca do Acre and Lábrea

Just two municipalities in the south of the state - Boca do Acre and Lábrea - account for 75 percent of all illegal logging in Amazonas. Leading the ranking, Boca do Acre recorded 20,500 hectares of irregular logging, while Lábrea had 10,900 hectares of illegal timber removal.

“These municipalities are located in the agricultural expansion region known as Amacro, on the border between Amazonas, Acre, and Rondônia states. Therefore, we warn that timber extraction in these territories may indicate future deforestation for land grabbing or for grain and cattle production, which reinforces the need to increase enforcement in these municipalities and prevent illegal products from entering the market,” Damasceno warned.

Protected lands

Illegal logging, the researcher said, encroaches on protected areas of the state, such as indigenous lands and conservation units, which raises concerns not only about environmental degradation but also about the survival of the communities that inhabit these areas.

“The entry of invaders to remove timber from these territories threatens traditional peoples and communities, who depend on the standing forest to sustain their way of life,” Damasceno explained.

The survey found that 13 percent of illegal timber extraction (5,600 hectares) occurred in protected areas, with 9 percent on indigenous lands (3,900 hectares) and 4 percent in conservation units (1,600 hectares). There was a 19 percent drop in illegal logging in protected areas compared to the previous study, when 6,900 hectares were mapped, of which 6,400 were on indigenous lands.

Despite the reduction, illegal logging still affected an area larger than 5,000 soccer fields within protected areas. Imazon notes that, in addition to the carbon emissions resulting from degradation, illegal logging also leads to biodiversity loss and social conflicts.

Rural properties listed in public databases such as the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR), the Land Management System (Sigef), and the Terra Legal Program accounted for 32,500 hectares of the area with illegal logging, representing 77 percent of the total. According to Imazon’s assessment, this result shows that public agencies already have the data needed to monitor and punish illegal activity in these areas.

Another category that drew the researchers’ attention regarding illegal logging in Amazonas is that of undesignated public forests (FPNDs), with 3,300 hectares (8%). FPNDs are publicly owned forest areas (federal, state, or municipal) whose use has not yet been officially defined, whether as conservation units or indigenous lands.

“Therefore, allocating these lands to traditional peoples and communities or to conservation is an urgent action to protect the public and environmental heritage of the people of Amazonas and of Brazil,” concluded the institute.

In the assessment of the 30th United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP30), held in Belém, northern Brazil, the consensus on 29 items of the climate agenda was celebrated among the 195 parties that participated in the negotiations. The final document, expected at the end of each COP, does not include other agreements that fall outside official decisions but are nonetheless reached in the multilateral setting, such as the Action Agenda.

According to Bruna Cerqueira, general coordinator of the COP30 Presidency’s Action Agenda, producing a document at the end of COP30 with 120 plans to accelerate climate initiatives - and with 190 countries acting on at least one of them - was an unprecedented global achievement.

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For the first time, initiatives that support the implementation of COP decisions - developed by actors such as the private sector and subnational governments - were organized into a kind of global repository of good ideas. According to Bruna Cerqueira, the intention was to bring together voluntary actions to speed up the implementation of what has already been agreed.

“We created six axes for the Action Agenda, focused on energy, industry, and transport; on forests, biodiversity, and oceans; on food systems and agriculture; on cities, infrastructure, and water; on human and social development; and a final cross-cutting one on financing, technology, and capacity building,” Cerqueira explained.

Results

In practice, the results could already be seen throughout the activities held in Belém. One example was the global initiative for land protection, a plan to accelerate the Forests and Land Tenure (Pledge) commitment, which had already existed beforehand.

According to the member of the COP30 Presidency, a more results-oriented approach and the effort to connect negotiations to people’s lives led to greater country participation in the plan and renewed funding for the initiative.

“USD 1.7 billion was advanced, and now they have set a further target of USD 1.5 to USD 2 billion in new resources. This new phase was also accompanied by a commitment from some countries to improve their land management. Brazil, in fact, announced the demarcation of some lands during the COP as part of this commitment as well,” Cerqueira stated.

Levers

After being classified under the six axes, the initiatives received assessments based on twelve implementation levers, considering perspectives that range from the regulation of initiatives in the territories to demand, supply, and public acceptance.

“We made a diagnosis of what is going well and what needs to be prioritized, and the plans are actions to address these levers, so that we can remove the obstacles and move forward more quickly,” the general coordinator added.

As a guide for this work, the COP30 presidency used the Global Stocktake (GST), a transparency mechanism of the Paris Agreement that assesses progress on long-term greenhouse gas emission targets. Conducted every five years, the first GST was delivered during COP28, held in 2023 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Connection

Based on the classification and diagnosis aligned with the GST results, the Action Agenda achieved an outcome that links formal negotiations to people’s daily lives, the coordinator assesses. “If we want to transform economies and bring everyone into the structure of these six axes, every economic actor and every member of society has to understand. Hardly anyone will know paragraph X of the GST, but if you talk about energy, industry, and transport, everyone understands,” she emphasized.

With 120 plans already developed, many of them underway, Bruna Cerqueira believes that the next steps will be to ensure that the Action Agenda is strengthened at future COPs. “The next presidency has already indicated, in the agreement between Turkey and Australia, that they appreciated the structure and intend to build on it. The challenge now is to consolidate this legacy and work with them to keep everyone at the table and accelerate implementation,” Cerqueira noted.