[00:00:03] Speaker A: This episode is supported by Rainforest Trust, protecting tropical forests and endangered wildlife. Since 1988, through local partnerships, community engagement and donor support, they've safeguarded over 66 million acres in almost 70 countries.
Learn more at rainforesttrust.org or click the link in this episode's description.
In June 1992, 179 nations sent their leaders to Rio de Janeiro for the largest environmental summit in history.
For two weeks, they negotiated, argued, and eventually agreed upon two landmark treaties that would govern how the world approached climate change and biodiversity management.
The frameworks created at those meetings remain the scaffolding for nearly every international conservation agreement that has followed.
Three decades later, Cop 30 landed in Belem, Brazil, and for the first time, a climate conference was held inside a tropical rainforest.
For the people who had spent their careers arguing that nature and climate were inseparable, it felt like a turning point.
But was it?
The people you've heard from throughout this series work in the field and in the lab.
But where is the fate of that work decided? In boardrooms, courtrooms, and in the streets.
Welcome to the series finale of Rewilding Amazonia. Pm I'm Brooke Mitchell. Let's discover what happens when policy meets reality.
The agreements get signed, pledges are made, and the headlines move on. And somewhere between a conference hall and a forest floor, most of the money disappears.
James Deutch has spent his career trying to close that gap by doing one thing very well.
Getting private money to the right place at the right time before the opportunity passes.
James is the CEO of Rainforest Trust, an organization that has helped protect over 60 million acres across the tropics without owning a single acre themselves.
He grew up in New York City and he told me about the moment that set his life's work into motion.
[00:02:25] Speaker B: When I was nine years old, I went on a summer day nature camp, and the counselor sat us down in the middle of this woods and pulled out a stick and started drawing on. So this would have been like around 1972.
And he had just read this paper and he drew this diagram. I'm nine years old. And described to us something that was brand new, that was called the greenhouse effect that he said was gonna ruin the world. So who knew that that's what I would end up working in? I studied philosophy as an undergraduate because I wanted to understand the meaning of life.
But that pretty quickly got me into biology because I realized that whether you wanted to understand the world or whether you wanted to understand yourself or consciousness or morality, it came down to biology and evolution.
And then that ended up Putting me in Africa, teaching high school in Kenya and then counting rhinos and then studying antelopes for a PhD and then briefly detouring for a career in HIV AIDS fundraising. During the middle of the AIDS crisis
[00:03:35] Speaker A: in Africa, I asked James to help me understand something I've been mulling over since the beginning of the series.
How a resolution passed in a conference hall becomes a protected area on the ground.
His answer starts with the targets themselves and why, counterintuitively, a number agreed upon by 197 countries can change what an individual president decides to do.
[00:04:02] Speaker B: I was impressed even way back when I was working 20 years ago for Wildlife Conservation Society to see those kind of global targets affect the actual ambitions of individual leaders of countries. So at that time I was working in Africa and both the president of Gabon and the president of Madagascar announced pledges to protect 10% of their lands and waters because of these kinds of global targets.
So all of that came together as we approached 2020.
Many of us realized that there was a possibility we could get all the countries of the world to pledge to protect 30% of all the world's land and 30% of all the world's water by 2030.
It finally happened in Montreal in 2022, and we see it impacting individuals. So right now we're in touch with the presidents of Panama and Suriname, for example, who are super excited about expanding their country's protected areas.
[00:05:06] Speaker A: Rainforest Trust role in getting there was deliberate, and it illustrates how private conservation finance can punch well above its weight when it's used strategically.
[00:05:16] Speaker B: We pledged half a billion dollars investment in saving the world's most critical habitats over 10 years this decade. But that pledge helped to inspire 10 other donors to get together and pledge a total of $5 billion.
And that pledge helped to inspire the government of Germany and the European Union to up their funding for conservation.
And all of that helped to persuade 197 countries finally in 2022 to agree to a pledge to protect 30% of the world's lands and oceans. So it really is a sort of snowball process of trying to leverage each pledge for something bigger.
[00:06:03] Speaker A: The way Rainforest Trust moves money is worth understanding because it's structurally different from how most people imagine large conservation organizations work.
[00:06:13] Speaker B: We are really a bridge between individual people who want to make the maximum positive difference to the world of nature that they can with the resources they have and the very, very best projects and partners and conservation leaders in the global south, in the tropics and subtropics, which is where most of the world's biodiversity is.
Our job really is relatively simple. It's to bring those two groups of people together in a flawless partnership and make sure that that works and provide to the people who are investing the money the accountability and transparency and effectiveness that they want and provide to the partners on the ground the resources and the support and the understanding and the technical advice that they want. So it's really a privileged position to be between these two other players who are far, far more important than we are.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: COP three, which James did not attend, citing both the carbon costs of the flight and Belem's limited hotel capacity, was where those two worlds were supposed to converge.
His assessment of what came out of it was less than ideal, but with some notable positives.
[00:07:33] Speaker B: The conference in Belem didn't make any real progress on the main issues of getting countries to agree to do stuff for climate or getting really big government money. The best they could do is to try to slow the decline in government money. But there were some exciting new developments that were announced, including Brazil put together this new mechanism for funding countries to maintain their tropical rainforests, called the tfff. And there were.
There was real progress in engaging indigenous people and local communities more in. In climate change, both increasing the amount of funding that goes directly to indigenous peoples groups and also getting all parties to agree that indigenous people needed to play a key role.
[00:08:30] Speaker A: The TFFF Tropical Forest Forever facility addresses what James described as a structural flaw in how carbon money has always moved climate money.
[00:08:42] Speaker B: Carbon money is mainly available for places where there's a lot of deforestation happening and you can reduce it, because if you can reduce the deforestation, you reduce the emissions.
But a problem with that approach is that it doesn't provide any money to places where deforestation has remained low. It doesn't provide any money to countries and communities that are doing a good job and have always been doing a good job. From a conservation and a practical deforestation point of view. It's crazy.
And so TFFF tries to get around that by creating a fundamental that would reward countries and communities that maintain a low deforestation rate. Verdict is still out. It's still working on it. It could still, it's still. We'll see.
[00:09:36] Speaker A: While still in the early days, the facility is now moving from proposal to implementation, though its full scale would depend on reaching larger capitalization targets on the withdrawal of US government funding, which until recently was the largest single donor to global conservation.
James was measured but honest.
[00:09:57] Speaker B: The largest donor to global conservation was the government of the United States. And the people of the United States, through its government, and most of that money has gone.
So you are not alone in feeling depressed about this, that hopefully it's not permanent, but it has caused and is causing a lot of damage around the world.
And it's also true that it's not all gloom and doom. Private individuals continue to contribute, foundations continue to contribute. People are looking for novel financial mechanisms like the TFFF or like leveraged combinations of lots of different funds. As a result, we do see places where conservation is being set back by the sudden loss of the largest donors support, but maybe not as catastrophic as we feared.
So we'll get through this together, I promise.
[00:10:58] Speaker A: All of the pledges, mechanisms and targeted private capital ultimately run up against the same foundational who has the right to make decisions about the land being protected.
James was direct about where he thinks the answer lies.
[00:11:15] Speaker B: The indigenous people from those places have the greatest moral claim to that land, and they also have the greatest tradition of acting as guardians and protectors of the forest and of nature.
And so in those huge tropical forests, the way forward almost invariably is to strengthen the guardianship, the land tenure, the support of indigenous people and local communities to protect nature and to prevent the land from being grabbed by people who want to turn it into industrial cattle production places, industrial soy farms, industrial palm oil plantations, gold mines.
[00:12:03] Speaker A: It's a vision that also shapes how he approaches his work. On the hardest days, a lot of
[00:12:09] Speaker B: my attention is focused not on the places where the worst stuff is happening, but on the places where there's a window of opportunity for great stuff to happen.
I just got back from a mission to visit the field and meet with the president of Suriname, which is a country that many of your listeners won't have heard of. It's the most forested country on Earth, 93% forested. And it's a country where no major new protected areas have been created since 1998.
[00:12:41] Speaker A: There is a window, and for James, that's enough to keep going.
Every protected area you've heard about in this series exists because someone established its legal status.
Every community whose territory has been invaded was enabled by a legal framework that treated their land as available.
The Amazon is not only a forest, it is many, many jurisdictions.
And what happens inside courtrooms and legislatures across Latin America is, in Constanza Prieto's view, every bit as consequential as what happens on the ground.
Constanza is a lawyer from Chile and the legal director for Latin America at the Earth Law center, where she has spent eight years advancing rights of Nature and Ecocentric law across the region.
She came to Environmental Law through Human Rights, an internship in Indigenous Peoples law in Washington D.C. that, as she put it, switched her mind completely.
When I asked her to help us understand what role law plays in the Amazon, both in enabling destruction and potentially stopping it.
She started with something most people don't think about.
[00:13:59] Speaker C: Legislation and public policy and political decision play really a central role.
Because it's not neutral.
When the citizens take a decision about who are taking the decision for us, this person, our legislator, and deciding what is the priority in our country, in our ecosystem, what activities were incentivized to this policy, what we want to protect and who will take the decision in this environment. So everything is happening is basically pass for the decision of us and the decision makers we are electing.
[00:14:45] Speaker A: And those decision makers across Latin America are operating inside a system that has long been shaped by a single priority.
[00:14:54] Speaker C: The economic system is shaping our legislation. Legislation is working for economic systems. So it's related with how we see, for example, nature. We see nature like a resource, ecological value, the cultural value, the spiritual value. And also a more diverse, a long term economic value too. Because we are talking about the short term decision making we are consuming for today, but what we are going to do tomorrow.
[00:15:27] Speaker A: Constanza described the startling result.
Governments are trying to protect the forest while destroying it at the same time through different ministries that have equal legal authority.
[00:15:38] Speaker C: Meanwhile, the Minister of the Environment is working in conservation areas. We have the Minister of Economy authorizing many concessions.
So there are this battle between these two perspectives are impermanent conflict in the region. You know, in our Constitution it's not reflected the priority is the conservation of environment.
In many cases that go to the court to be resolved. Like what is the priority? Conservation or extraction?
[00:16:13] Speaker A: When it does go to court. The communities most affected by extractive projects face another layer of the problem.
Their right to be consulted before a project begins on their land is recognized in law across much of Latin America, but routinely violated in practice.
[00:16:29] Speaker C: In general, they have as a minimum the right of being consulted in case some kind of project can impact their territories. But in many cases that consultation don't comply with the standards the for example Inter American Court of Human Rights require for the interests of the companies, for the interest of the state and also unfortunately starting companies to destruct this question between the communities.
So start creating separation between the communities for economic interest, unfortunately, and creative fight between them. So making more difficult these consent altogether in the management of their land.
And also they are in many, many, many Cases persecuted by the companies, but also criminalized by the state. Because in general these big destructive companies are doing praise of national interest.
So these national interests make them like basically terrorists. Make the indigenous people terrorists and also
[00:17:50] Speaker A: criminals criminalized for defending land they have held for centuries by governments that simultaneously recognize their right to the land.
It is the central legal contradiction Constanza navigates every day. And is why she has come to believe that the most important battles are not always the most dramatic ones.
[00:18:09] Speaker C: The core of the right of nature is understand that nature have an intrinsic value. So not only in benefit of humans, but also in benefit of nature itself. Bees have a value because help to pollinate, for example, endemic some endemic plants or tree of the Amazonia rate of nature try to be reachable. And of this basic concept or philosophical concept. For a more legislative concept or a framework creating a specific right for nature to exist, thrive and basically exist to maintain their functions like we have basic rights. Nature had also basic rights for themselves and their own interest.
[00:19:02] Speaker A: In Peru, where rights of nature don't exist in the constitution, an indigenous federation of kucama women did something unprecedented. They filed suit against the government and the state oil company Petro Peru over oil spills in the Maranoan river. The court's response surprised everyone.
[00:19:20] Speaker C: So this court decided to recognize the right of the Marano river as a subject of right. And also recognizing the cucumber woman and other the indigenous community as a guardian of the Maranha. Using the current framework, these legislations still being very important.
Using constitutional law, the right of indigenous people and also international law, which is the American Convention of Human Rights Legislation and international convention matters and can play an important role.
[00:19:55] Speaker A: No constitutional amendment required, only a judge willing to interpret the existing law in favor of the river.
But winning in court is only the beginning.
[00:20:05] Speaker C: When we won a case, then where is the money to implement the decision? Also from what budget we will start, you know. So it's very difficult to implement in many cases, I can say many cases, for example, where they name guardians, but the guardians have to support. They work by their own. They don't have any money to work.
So it's really difficult.
[00:20:35] Speaker A: Hugo Jabini has been waiting nearly two decades for full compliance with his inter American court ruling. Constanza knows that gap well, but she isn't finished.
[00:20:44] Speaker C: We need to fight even for an article, even for a principle. If we can do something, a little something can change, for example, a future decision, the destiny of a river, etc. Just think about the four articles in the Constitution. Of Ecuador, how many projects have stopped.
So, yeah, I think it's possible.
[00:21:11] Speaker A: She closed our conversation with a reminder that what happens to the Amazon is not a technical problem.
It is a choice.
[00:21:20] Speaker C: The decisions are never neutral, you know, they have a consequence. Every species has a role and can be impacted. For the decision we make, the person who are we electing, who we are accepting as our decision makers, they're taking the future generation, our ecosystem. So we have to speak for nature. Nature need us on many levels.
[00:21:47] Speaker A: Legal victories and financial commitments mean little without public pressure. And building that sustained civic engagement, particularly among the communities living closest to the destruction, is where Kataina Nefertari focuses her work.
Katerina is a communications and mobilization manager at Amazonia Jepe, a civil society organization based in Belem whose mission is closing the distance between the people most impacted by the Amazon's fate and in the rooms where decisions about its future are made.
When cop 30 came to her city, that distance suddenly felt very small and in certain ways, very large.
When I asked her what the experience felt like from the inside, she didn't start with the negotiations. She started with her daughter's school.
[00:22:35] Speaker D: My daughter, her whole year they had programmations with COP 30 team. COP 30 was the.
It was our lives in last year.
The city changed the streets. A lot of constructions going on. It really changed our dynamic in the city. So when cop 30 start, and I think, okay, this is. Was on the ground, on the the daily lives of Belen citizens.
[00:23:06] Speaker A: For Katarina, COP30, MBLM meant more than logistics. Amazon issues, she told me, are almost always treated as regional problems. And she spent years watching the international climate conversation look the other way.
[00:23:21] Speaker D: We know that most of the time, Amazon and Brazil issues are not treated as a global thing to be faced. We know that in COP spaces, regional issues are not addressed as good as they should.
I think it was a great opportunity for us to spotlight that. Okay, Amazon is a huge part of Brazil. We need to worry about it and we need to see what we can do.
[00:23:51] Speaker A: Outside the negotiating halls, that spotlight took a more confrontational form. The protests Catarina described weren't abstracted. They were organized around a specific and urgent dispute happening in Brazil right now.
[00:24:05] Speaker D: So here in Brazil, we are facing this big dilemma right now that it's the exploration of oil.
Even though the world is trying to phase out fossil fuels here in Brazil, fossil fuels are not our main cause of production of greenhouse gases. Here, our main cause, it's deforestation.
And the Brazil government really wants to explore more fossil fuels to Develop the country in the area of Amazon that is called Forest Amazones. And there's a lot of technical notes and technical issues to do it because it's really close to conservancy areas.
[00:24:51] Speaker A: Inside the negotiating halls, the picture was harder to read.
Katarina had been following the process closely with civil society groups from across Brazil and she came away with more than she expected and in other ways less.
[00:25:06] Speaker D: If we look for the whole picture, we didn't have great advances.
If we want to look for, okay, we want something.
I think cop 30 made a multi dome legacy, you know, so this will be a COP that marks a moment when people were part of cop. People were on the streets, people were leaving the city because COP study was happening. There were programmations all over the city and the civil society was really involved.
When we make people part of the discussion, we can see what they are facing. We can see the diversity of problems they are facing on their Tejita stories too.
[00:25:55] Speaker A: Participation as legacy is harder to measure than a signed agreement or a funding pledge. And Katarina holds it alongside a very specific frustration about who the COP process reaches and who it consistently leaves out.
[00:26:09] Speaker D: Who do we want to mobilize? You know, people who have a lot of money or people who studies at public schools and are facing some social economic issues in their houses. The most impacted people in the climate change issues are the youth, the peripherals youth, the children, the moms, the women. And mobilizing them requires us to be aware of what they need, you know, so we want climate majority, but we need to understand that the challenges that youth are facing so we can empathize with them and they see we understand, then they will get closer and we will mobilize.
[00:27:00] Speaker A: Before COP30, her team worked with young leaders from all five regions of Brazil to develop climate narratives in their own words. Distributed nationally on Amazon Day in September, reaching people on the their own terms.
When I asked what COP30 had ultimately delivered, she didn't pretend it was enough.
[00:27:20] Speaker D: I think it's a great legacy when we, we make people part of the discussion. When it comes to the solution parts. We need to believe in the COP process because it's a space that exists and happens every, every year.
Although it's really frustrating to see their time to do things. Brazil did a big effort to guarantee consensus. The Brazil president did a big effort mobilize civil society. We couldn't see the advances we wanted to see.
[00:27:57] Speaker A: Katharina believes in the process and is honest about its limits.
This work demands faith without illusion and is perhaps what sustains people over the long haul?
Over the past six months, I sat down with 22 people across six countries.
Scientists, lawyers, activists, community leaders, wildlife rescuers and practitioners who have dedicated their lives to this forest.
None of them alone holds the answer.
But together and the work they are doing across every scale and border of the Amazon basin, the answer is taking shape.
[00:28:36] Speaker E: His eyes kind of glance around and he's like, you missed it. It's here. It does exist. You will be walking on interlaced tree roots. You will be walking through great halls of columns of massive trees. There will be a canopy over your head that is the vaulted ceiling of the jungle. The conquistadors were so focused on the gold, on the short term monetary assets, that they missed that beautiful jungle that was in front of them.
[00:29:05] Speaker A: There is wonder in this forest that no extraction spreadsheet can account for.
[00:29:11] Speaker D: Losing a culture. I see it almost as like deleting part of the humanity's memory. How can we better act in terms of future or changing realities if we don't understand the past? It's not just a culture, it's not just a language that we're losing. No, you connect it to something deeper, which is what, what it is. And it's so scary.
[00:29:29] Speaker A: And there are people who have been carrying that memory for generations, long before anyone called it conservation.
[00:29:36] Speaker E: When I'm out in the forest with them and hearing their stories and you know, as we're falling asleep at night in our tents, hearing them sort of share stories amongst themselves about animals they saw they were hunting the night before and it's just a joyful environment that gives me a lot of hope. They remind me why it's important to do this work. When my alarm goes off at four in the morning and it's time to get up and hit the trail, I'm excited to do so. And that's because of their passion and commitment.
[00:30:06] Speaker A: And then there is the question of what we are actually protecting it for.
[00:30:11] Speaker C: Think about the beauty of this world
[00:30:13] Speaker A: and think about the next generations.
[00:30:16] Speaker C: Your kids are going to see that is beauty.
[00:30:19] Speaker A: Your grandkids are going to enjoy this beauty.
[00:30:22] Speaker E: If the answer is not, then it's not fair.
[00:30:25] Speaker C: So try to do something fair now
[00:30:28] Speaker A: for the next generations.
And then there is what it means to never give up.
[00:30:33] Speaker B: My inspiration comes from the fact that my ancestors managed to flew from the plantation and entered the unknown forest and maintained to set up autonomous community and that we still exist till today with our land, our language, our culture, our governance structure. We are winners, we are warriors.
[00:30:54] Speaker E: But we are also winners.
[00:30:55] Speaker B: We will always win.
[00:30:57] Speaker A: The Amazon is a forest, a weather system, a home, and the most biodiverse place on the planet.
The ground is shifting in both directions at once, towards collapse in some regions and towards restoration in others. The people in this series, and thousands of more are why rewilding the Amazon is still possible.
Before I let you go, I want to talk to you directly.
The people you heard from are still out there doing the work, and there's a place for you in this story too.
Sharing this series is one of the most powerful things you can do.
Send it to just one person you think will enjoy it as well.
Strike up a conversation about one cool fact you learn at the next coffee shop run.
The more people who understand what's at stake, the louder our collective voices become.
If you can, give Give Cool Earth and Rainforest Trust are two of the most effective organizations working in the Amazon.
Every organization featured in this series is linked in the show notes too.
Find the one that resonates with you.
Every dollar you give will go directly to the places where it is needed most.
If you can travel, by all means, please go visit the Amazon. Spend your money with the communities protecting it.
Rainforest Expeditions on the Tombapata river is one of the best places to start, and when you show up as a traveler who cares, you become a part of the economic argument for keeping keeping the forest standing.
If this series was valuable to you, you can also support rewadology
[email protected] everything we do this series Future investigations the communities we're building depends on people who believe this kind of storytelling matters.
Thank you for listening and thank you for caring.
[00:33:00] Speaker C: Sam.
