Governing environmental services, socio-cultural diversity, and economic activities in the Amazon Basin amid social-environmental and climate change is one of the most pressing challenges for sustainability.

While government-driven solutions are commonly viewed as the route to sustainability, most sustainable forest management in the Amazon comes from individual and collective initiatives. This project further aims at contributing to the development of approaches and analytical tools to catalyse recognition and assessment of existing, but often scattered “pieces of solutions” to protect and govern biodiversity and landscapes. Hence, the project will analyse the areas which are subject to deforestation drivers, but still present forest cover and/or reforestation actions for understanding the local conservational dynamics and try to identify possibilities for upscaling these elements.

We have three main goals, described as follows:

1. Assess promising transformative individual and collective land use practices in the Amazon basin—including those that reconcile forest conservation and food production—and how they are connected across scales through sustainable landscape governance.
2. Contribute approaches and analytical tools to highlight contributions of existing sustainable transformations initiatives as well as suggest ways to promote the spatial connectivity of such approaches in the selected research areas.
3. Develop methods to qualify and quantify the role of individual and collective action in the use and conservation of biodiversity in a scientifically sound yet practical, participatory, and affordable way.