New Findings Support Increased Finance for Indigenous Land Stewardship

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

We tend to imagine the Amazon as virgin forest, untouched and unspoiled, but the truth is that Indigenous people have been married to her since long before the birth of what we now call civilization. For thousands of years, they’ve combed her green hair, sung lullabies to her rivers, and seduced her into a pact of reciprocity. 

It’s a relationship that endures to this day, but when scientists from Chloris Geospatial used artificial intelligence to sharpen 25 years of blurry satellite images, they uncovered previously invisible threats to this coexistence.

Specifically, while deforestation is finally under control, another malady, degradation—the slow leaching of vitality – is spreading like rot in a bad tooth, leading to losses on the ground as biomass decomposes into carbon dioxide. 

It’s less visible than deforestation, but just as dangerous.

The good news: this loss is up to two thirds lower inside Indigenous territories than it is elsewhere, but only when indigenous people get support from the outside.

Dig deeper, and three lessons emerge:

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

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

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

These deeper lessons emerged when the Chloris team looked to see how their findings varied across different types of land management: Indigenous territories, 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 limited scale.

This is especially impressive because Indigenous territories are not empty reserves but populated, working forests, and REDD+ projects are located in areas under greater 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.

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.

New satellite analysis from Chloris Geospatial shows that they succeeded: deforestation nearly ground to a halt, but climate change itself presents a new danger: degradation. 

From above, the canopy shows intact forest. From below, it’s often a rotting tooth.

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

The evidence demands a recalibration of climate policy and finance:

  • Channel resources to Indigenous-led conservation – raise funding from under 1% to a scale commensurate with their contributions.¹³

  • Incorporate degradation into accounting systems to capture the full spectrum of forest carbon dynamics.

  • Value avoided emissions as high-quality outcomes, correcting the bias that undervalues prevention.

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. 

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.