New Findings Support Increased Finance for REDD+ and Indigenous Land Stewardship

This Chloris Geospatial position paper was prepared by Steve Zwick, based on research by Alessandro Baccini.

We often think of the Amazon as untouched wilderness, but Indigenous people have lived in and shaped this forest for thousands of years. 

Their stewardship survived war, colonization, and modern pressures, yet new research from Chloris Geospatial suggests that this resilience is now under strain—even as it highlights practical ways to support and extend it. 

Specifically, new Chloris data confirms that carbon finance, Indigenous protection, and government action have slowed deforestation; but their AI-enhanced analysis of 25 years of satellite data reveals a different danger: degradation, the gradual erosion of forest health. 

Degradation is harder to spot than clear-cutting, but just as dangerous—and it appears to be driven less by chainsaws than by climate change. This underscores the need for active, ongoing management rather than passive protection. 

The key finding: Biomass losses are roughly two-thirds lower inside Indigenous territories than elsewhere, but only when that stewardship is reinforced with outside support. 

Dig deeper, and three lessons stand out: 

  1. Without Indigenous stewardship, the Amazon’s survival is in jeopardy. 

  2. Climate change is accelerating the pressure on already fragile forests. 

  3. Even the most effective local management cannot succeed without sustained external support. 

These deeper lessons emerged when Chloris looked to see how their findings varied across different types of land management: Indigenous territories, carbon-financed conservation (REDD+) projects, government reserves, and a grab-bag category called “other.” In the first three, they confirmed that deforestation had slowed to trickle, but the sharper focus showed that degradation has gotten worse over the decades. 

Then came insurance group CarbonPool, who blended Chloris’s biomass numbers with data on fire, drought, and other disturbances. They found that only half of this thinning comes directly from human hands. The other half comes from droughts and fires, the fingerprints of climate change itself.  

Biomass loss by the Numbers (2017–2024)

The top row shows where different land management types are located across the Brazilian Amazon. The bar underneath reports carbon losses from 2017 to 2024, with pie charts showing how much came from degradation (dark grey), deforestation (grey), or other sources (light gray). The results show that Indigenous territories and REDD+ projects conserve forest carbon more effectively than other lands, with the lowest loss rates found in Indigenous territories that overlap government-protected areas. 

The grab-bag category, “other,” accounts for more than 40% of the Amazon’s biomass, and from 2017 to 2024 land in this category lost 4.8% of its biomass. That’s more than three times the rate of loss in the most resilient areas: Indigenous territories that also overlap with government-protected areas. 

Among stand-alone categories of intervention, REDD+ projects fared best, with a 1.97% loss, followed by Indigenous territories at 2.35% and government-protected areas at 2.61%. 

It is worth noting that while REDD+ projects demonstrate the strongest performance among individual conservation models, they currently account for just 3.59% of the Amazon’s biomass. This underscores both their effectiveness and their need to scale. 

The findings are especially impressive because Indigenous territories are not empty reserves but populated, working forests, and REDD+ projects are located in areas under verifiable pressure. 

The study highlights a paradox. Indigenous people remain the most effective defenders of the Amazon, yet they often do so at the expense of their own development. Without reliable schools, health care and economic security, they cannot carry this burden alone. Unless financial systems recognize and reward their service, the stewardship that has protected the Amazon for millennia will remain at risk. 

Indigenous leader Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim underlined the point at a Chloris side event during UN Climate Week in New York.

“Every head of state was parading to the stage, talking about ambition, about history, about their clean energy, but not one mentioned Indigenous peoples,” she said. “Maybe we haven’t pushed enough, but this data can change that.” 

Key Findings

  • Conservation has slashed deforestation: Classic deforestation has largely been eliminated in REDD+ projects, Indigenous territories, and protected areas – even though the first two are populated areas, not protected parks. 

  • Degradation sneaks in the back door: Subtler processes — selective logging, fire, and drought — account for up to 80% of emissions where deforestation is low. 

  • Climate link: Evidence shows that roughly half the degradation comes from climate change itself – not direct human activities. 

The Take-Home

  • Conservation works—but the threat has shifted. Current policies and practices focus on curbing deforestation at the edge of the forest, but these activities must address degradation to remain effective. 

  • Policy shift needed: Accounting systems, REDD+ programs, and climate finance must channel more resources to Indigenous stewardship, which remain among the most cost-effective defenses against climate instability. 

Why it Matters

Spanning nine countries and an area nearly the size of the continental United States, the Amazon holds an immense stock of carbon in its trees and soils. Recent estimates show that Amazonian forests bind roughly 650 billion tons of CO₂ in their biomass – an enormous stock comparable to many years of global carbon emissions.¹  

As climate-induced stressors push the Amazon to a tipping point, it is imperative for policymakers and international funders to recognize and reward Indigenous stewardship, refocus climate strategies on avoiding emissions (especially through forest protection), and align finance and policy frameworks with this reality. The most energy-efficient climate solutions lie in keeping carbon in the forest, not in costly attempts to recapture it later. 

Degradation: The Second D

For decades, the fight to save the Amazon was written in scars: fires seen from space, chainsaws biting at the forest’s edge, a crescent wound carved across the map. Governments and NGOs struck where the damage was visible: distinct changes in land use that could be seen from space.  

The acronym “REDD” stands for “Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries.” The “+” in “REDD+” stands for additional forest-related activities that protect the climate – namely, sustainable management of forests and the conservation and enhancement of forest carbon stocks. 

From its inception, the REDD framework was built upon two distinct, yet related, concepts of forest carbon loss: deforestation and forest degradation. 

  • Deforestation was understood as the more straightforward of the two: the permanent, human-induced conversion of forested land to non-forest land use, such as agriculture, pasture, or urban development¹. From a remote sensing perspective, this represented a clear, binary change in land cover classification—a pixel that was once "forest" becomes "non-forest."    

  • Forest Degradation, the "second D," was defined as a reduction in the carbon stock or biomass density within a forest that does not result in a change in land use². The area remains classified as forest, but its capacity to store carbon and provide ecosystem services is diminished³. This could result from activities like selective logging, understory fires, fuelwood collection, or pest outbreaks.    

While deforestation was a relatively discrete event, degradation was immediately recognized as a more complex, gradual, and subtle process, posing a far greater challenge for measurement and monitoring⁴.

Here you can see how the old method shows a healthy forest, while the new one identifies illnesses before symptoms emerge. 

Satellite activity data (left) records only tree cover change, masking much of the story. Direct biomass estimation (right) reveals both regrowth and hidden degradation, showing how climate stress is eroding carbon stocks even in protected forests.

Unrecognized and Underfunded: The Cost of Indigenous Stewardship

It is a bitter irony that those who have done the most to safeguard the Amazon are among the least supported and most vulnerable. Indigenous peoples have protected the forest for generations at great personal expense.² 

According to a 2021 Rainforest Foundation Norway report, international aid for Indigenous and local community forest management averaged only $270 million per year between 2011 and 2020, which is less than 1% of worldwide climate finance.³ Of this amount, only 17% was directed to projects actually involving Indigenous organizations, meaning the vast majority was funneled through intermediaries. Little decision-making power was given to the communities themselves.⁴ More broadly, despite global acknowledgment of Indigenous peoples’ outsized role in conservation, they receive under 1–2% of climate funding by most estimates.⁵ 

There is also a perverse incentive problem embedded in current climate finance frameworks. Funding is often predicated on “additionality” – rewarding reductions in deforestation from visible, immediate threats. This means communities who have already kept deforestation low (so-called “High-Forest, Low-Deforestation” (HFLD) areas) are paradoxically penalized.⁶ The system essentially says: “cut trees first, and we’ll pay you to stop.” This dynamic is not only unfair but also counterproductive. Indigenous and other HFLD communities should be rewarded for avoiding emissions and keeping forests intact, not forced into a destructive baseline to receive support.⁷ 

The Case for Avoided Emissions

Protecting forests matters more than planting new trees because of the way carbon works. A mature forest holds carbon in a dense, stable, and highly organized form—locked safely in trunks, branches, roots, and soils. Once that forest is cut, burned, or left to decay, the carbon turns into CO₂, a diffuse gas that spreads into the atmosphere. It’s like smashing a vase into pieces: the order is lost, and putting it back together is far harder than keeping it intact in the first place. 

This creates a simple hierarchy for climate action: the most efficient step is to protect existing forests, which are already doing the job of storing carbon in a low-entropy state. Planting new trees can help, but it takes decades for them to approach the storage capacity of a mature forest:    

  • Avoidance: Preventing the emissions in the first place—by not burning the forest—requires the least energy. It prevents the increase in disorder from ever happening. 

  • Reduction at Source: Capturing emissions from a smokestack is more difficult but still deals with a relatively concentrated system. 

  • Removal: Attempting to recapture diffuse CO2 molecules once they are scattered throughout the atmosphere is the most energy-intensive and thermodynamically difficult path. It is a direct fight against entropy. 

The sheer scale of the Amazon's low-entropy carbon reservoir puts this imperative into stark relief. The basin is estimated to store approximately 123 billion tonnes of carbon above and below ground, equivalent to roughly 450 gigatonnes of CO2. 

The better approach is clear: keep carbon where it is whenever possible. Avoided deforestation and degradation represent permanent emissions avoided, negating the need for costly future carbon scrubbing. They also deliver co-benefits – protecting biodiversity, water cycles, and local livelihoods – that engineered carbon removal cannot offer. Avoiding one ton of CO₂ emission today is far more valuable than attempting to pull a ton of CO₂ out of the air in 2035 or 2050.⁸ 

Economically, forest protection is among the most cost-effective climate solutions available.⁹ By contrast, the most promising direct air capture technologies today cost about $100 or more per ton of CO₂ removed,¹⁰ and some estimates run far higher.¹¹ Even large-scale reforestation takes decades to accumulate carbon, whereas avoiding the loss of an old-growth forest prevents an immediate, irreplaceable emission.¹² 

Policy Shifts and Financial Support: Investing in Indigenous Stewardship

It’s important to emphasize that the overlap between Indigenous territories and protected areas is not merely additive but synergistic, combining the strengths of both approaches. 

State protection brings the weight of law, but “paper parks” are vulnerable to chronic pressures: small-scale logging, mining and encroachment that underfunded enforcement agencies struggle to contain.  

Indigenous presence supplies what state bureaucracy often lacks: constant monitoring, rooted in both livelihood needs and cultural imperatives for long-term stewardship. The combination creates a uniquely durable form of defense, where state authority reinforces community rights, and community vigilance gives teeth to state law. 

Ibrahim underlined this point as well, explaining how her people, the Mbororo, actively manage their land, in part by recognizing several species of “sacred” trees that serve distinct ecological functions – from fire resistance to soil restoration.  “This is knowledge science alone cannot capture,” she said. 

The Chloris data also highlights the sheer importance of Indigenous stewardship. Territories under their control contain about a quarter of the Amazon’s aboveground carbon, and they manage this resource with the same effectiveness as internationally financed REDD+ projects, yet with far less recognition or support. This amounts to a massive, but largely uncompensated, climate service. It is very risky to assume that such stewardship will endure without reinforcement. Indigenous communities face escalating threats from illegal miners, loggers and agricultural expansion, often accompanied by violence and the erosion of legal protections. 

The conclusion is inescapable. Supporting Indigenous rights and livelihoods is not merely a matter of social justice or co-benefits. It is core to climate security. The stability of a quarter of the Amazon’s carbon stock depends on their resilience. Failure to channel meaningful finance directly to these communities—to strengthen territorial defense, governance and sustainable economies—is failure to manage a systemic climate risk. 

Attribution: What’s causing it?

Recent attribution analysis by CarbonPool builds on Chloris Geospatial’s biomass monitoring and compares project-level losses to the global framework developed by WRI and DeepMind (Sims et al., 2025). Whereas earlier studies largely distinguished between deforestation and degradation, the CarbonPool approach disaggregates the specific drivers of degradation inside REDD+, Improved Forest Management (IFM), and afforestation/reforestation projects across the Amazon basin. 

By blending Chloris biomass data with detailed fire and drought exposure mapping—while also accounting for lagged effects of past droughts—the study shows a sharp shift in what drives biomass loss. In the early 2000s, nearly all losses inside project areas were tied to direct human activities such as logging, permanent agriculture, and shifting cultivation. Today, however, roughly half of all project-level losses stem from climate-driven hazards—principally drought and fire—with the other half linked to human activities or secondary disturbances such as insects. 

This means that the balance of threats has tilted: degradation, not deforestation, is now the dominant source of biomass decline inside projects and Indigenous territories. Because much of this degradation is tied to external, climate-change-related stressors rather than local land-use choices, the findings underscore both the heightened vulnerability of these forests and the need for sustained investment in their management and resilience. 

Biomass loss drivers over time for all projects. The stacked areas show the absolute contribution from fire, drought, and other loss drivers, over time. 

Methodological Framework 

The analysis is based on a methodology developed by Chloris Geospatial. The core principles of this approach are: 

  1. Continuum of Biomass Density: The method rejects a binary classification of landscapes into "forest" and "non-forest" categories. Instead, it measures the density of aboveground biomass as a continuous variable for every location. This allows for the detection of both complete removal of biomass (deforestation) and partial loss (degradation) within an area that may still be considered a forest. 

  2. Multi-Source Data Integration: The biomass estimates are generated by combining field-based inventory data, airborne LiDAR observations, and satellite imagery from space-based sensors. This multi-layered approach allows for robust calibration and the creation of wall-to-wall maps of carbon stocks and changes. 

  3. High Spatio-Temporal Resolution: The data is provided at a 30-meter spatial resolution on an annual frequency. The historical record extends from the year 2000 to the present (2024), enabling detailed time-series analysis of carbon dynamics. 

  4. Nested and Consistent Accounting: Because the data is generated from a single, consistent methodology across space and time, it allows for a "nested" accounting approach. Carbon fluxes can be aggregated and compared seamlessly from the individual pixel level up to the project, state (jurisdictional), and national levels without inconsistencies or methodological gaps. 

Analytical Limitations  

While this methodology provides a comprehensive and powerful view of landscape dynamics, it is crucial to acknowledge its limitations. 

  1. No Counterfactual Baseline: This study looks only at the actual, measured changes in forest biomass over time. It does not include a “what if” scenario showing what would have happened without protection. Such counterfactuals are required for carbon crediting to prove additional benefits. So these results should be seen as an observation of real changes, not as a formal check or validation of carbon credits. 

  2. Challenges in Degradation Validation: The model’s estimates match well with airborne LiDAR data taken over time. But there isn’t enough on-the-ground data to fully confirm forest degradation. This lack of field data is still a major scientific gap and makes it hard to measure exactly how much carbon loss comes from degradation. 

  3. Sample Representativeness of REDD+ Projects: The analysis looked at about 50 REDD+ projects where data was available. These projects may not represent all REDD+ projects in the Brazilian Amazon, since the sample isn’t random. That means the loss rates found here might not fully apply to every project. 

  4. Mixed Nature of the "Other Land" Category: The “Other Land” category was used as a control group, but it includes many different kinds of areas, some of which had already lost most of their forest before the study period. As a result, the observed loss rate of 4.8% (or 12% over the whole period) may actually underestimate the normal background rate of loss in intact, threatened forests. This makes the protected areas look even stronger in comparison. 

Conclusion

The Amazon is at a crossroads. Indigenous guardians have already kept billions of tonnes of CO₂ out of the atmosphere by preventing deforestation on their lands. But without significant support, they may be overwhelmed by external pressures and climate stress. Conversely, with adequate support, they can remain the cornerstone of global climate solutions. 

For policymakers and funders, the imperative is clear: invest in Indigenous stewardship, prioritize avoided emissions, and align finance with forest health. Every ton of carbon kept in the forest today is one less ton we will have to chase tomorrow. 

¹ NASA Earth Observatory. “Amazon Carbon Stocks and Global Climate.” NASA, 2023.

² Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA). Statement to UNFCCC COP26. Glasgow, 2021.

³ Rainforest Foundation Norway. Falling Short: Donor Funding for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities’ Tenure and Forest Management 2011–2020. Oslo: RFN, 2021.

⁴ Ibid

⁵ The Nature Conservancy. “Financing Indigenous Forest Protection: A Global Gap.” Arlington, VA: TNC, 2022.

⁶ Coalition for Rainforest Nations. High-Forest, Low-Deforestation Countries and Climate Finance. New York: CfRN, 2019.

⁷ Ibid

⁸ Griscom, Bronson W., et al. “Natural Climate Solutions.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 44 (2017): 11645–11650.

⁹ Ibid

¹⁰ International Energy Agency (IEA). Direct Air Capture: A Key Technology for Net Zero. Paris: IEA, 2022.

¹¹ Smith, Pete, et al. “The Costs of Carbon Dioxide Removal.” Nature Climate Change 10 (2020): 640–646.

¹² Griscom, Bronson W., et al. “Natural Climate Solutions.” PNAS 2017.

¹³ Rainforest Foundation Norway. Falling Short.