Main Issue

The Amazon accounts for more than 40% of Earth’s remaining rainforest and is home to at least 10% of the world’s known species. Critical to the rainforest’s health and rich biodiversity, the Amazon river flows for more than 6,600 km and contributes more than 15% of the world’s total river discharge into the oceans. The river and its more than 1,100 tributaries also contain the largest number of freshwater fish species in the world. The Amazon basin is one of the largest and mostly undisturbed forest ecosystems that still has the potential to be conserved and managed sustainably.

Equally important, the Amazon plays a critical regional and global role in climate regulation. Amazon forests help regulate temperature and humidity and are linked to regional climate patterns through hydrological cycles that depend on the forests. The Amazon contains 90-140 billion metric tons of carbon, the release of even a portion of which could accelerate global warming significantly. Still, land conversion and deforestation in the Amazon release up to 0.5 billion metric tons of carbon per year, not including emissions from forest fires.

The Amazon includes 610 protected areas, as well as 2,344 indigenous territories that cover 45 percent of the basin. The area is predominantly covered by dense moist tropical forest, while 14 percent of the Amazon is wetlands. Less extensive areas include savannas, floodplain forests, grasslands, swamps, bamboos and palm forests. About 33 million people live in the Amazon watershed, deriving their livelihoods from rivers and tributaries, including fisheries.

The major threats to the Amazon biome include transportation infrastructure (roads), extractive industries (mining, oil, and gas), water infrastructure (dams, extraction, usage, waterways), and agricultural expansion driven primarily by commodity production, all of which, in direct and indirect ways, contribute to deforestation.

What We Do

The GEF established the Amazon Sustainable Landscapes Program in GEF-6, with participation of Brazil, Colombia, and Peru that together span 75% of the Amazon basin. The program builds on over a decade of work in the Amazon to strengthen biodiversity conservation, reduce deforestation, and improve community livelihoods.

The GEF’s work in the Amazon focuses on improving the management and financial sustainability of protected areas; strengthening sustainable forest management; reducing carbon emissions from deforestation; and incorporating biodiversity management principles (both conservation and sustainable use) into selected sectors that are drivers of deforestation (i.e., agriculture, extractive industries, and infrastructure) through policies, sectoral agreements, and/or instruments that engage private sector actors. These interventions together aim to improve the overall connectivity of the Amazon ecosystem, thereby furthering the integrity of the local, regional, and global ecosystem services.

Results

In October 2015, the GEF announced a five-year commitment of $113 million for the Amazon Sustainable Landscapes Program (ASL-1). We expect our investment will leverage another $682 million in additional financing.

Since the inception of ASL-1, the GEF has supported the creation of 44 new protected areas in the Amazon region, covering 24 million hectares. The GEF’s efforts protect a significant percentage of the Amazon’s biodiversity, including 56 species that are threatened with extinction.

Looking Ahead

Managing the Amazon for environmental, economic, and climate benefits requires working across all sorts of boundaries: across countries and between jurisdictions in country; from local communities and indigenous peoples to national ministries and international treaty organizations; and among different ministries.

Based on this assumption, the Amazon Sustainable Landscapes Program was the first significant regional investment by GEF to manage terrestrial ecosystems in the Amazon biome that included the participation of multiple countries. The effort has been expanded in GEF-7 with the approval of the Amazon Sustainable Landscapes Program (ASL-2) in June 2019.

ASL-2 will seek to build upon the ongoing efforts of ASL-1, expanding the geographic scope, improving protected area systems including for wetlands/freshwater ecosystems, implementing integrated forest landscape approaches, and helping reinforce and improve coordination of actions on the ground, all the while fostering synergistic efforts within and between the participating countries. The ASL-2 Program will greatly expand in scale as it will now include Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, and Suriname, which together cover approximately 92% of the basin. The program will invest in several instruments to develop a forest- and freshwater-based economy and consequently reduce deforestation in areas where the conservation of Amazonian ecosystems is of paramount importance for the health of terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems and associated ecosystem services, including climate change regulation.

The program takes a multi-scale and multi-stakeholder integrated approach to protecting the Amazon ecosystem. The regional approach reflects commitment by countries and partner agencies to coordinate actions and priorities that cover a significant portion of the entire ecosystem, with the aim of creating connectivity of the forest across borders, enhancing ecosystem integrity, and achieving biome-wide reductions in deforestation. 

The coordinated approach includes expert knowledge sharing between the countries, which will serve as building blocks for deepening transboundary collaboration in addressing shared management challenges that are regional in nature, such as the management of freshwater ecosystems, infrastructure development for transport and energy development, and gold mining, among others.

The ASL-1 Program will deliver multiple global environmental benefits, such as strengthening management effectiveness of more than 66 million hectares of protected lands; facilitating the creation of 4.3 million hectares of new protected areas; promoting sustainable productive practices in approximately 11 million hectares; restoring 35,000 hectares of forests; and, supporting actions to help mitigate 164 metric tons of CO2 equivalent (MTCO2e) of emissions.

The ASL-2 Program will deliver additional global environmental benefits, including strengthening management effectiveness of an additional 32 million hectares of protected lands, promoting sustainable productive practices in 16 million hectares of landscapes, restoring 18,000 hectares of land; and, supporting actions to help mitigate 29.8 MTCO2e of emissions.