Amid last year’s Amazon fires crisis, Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro addressed the United Nations General Assembly and placed a share of the blame for the wave of deforestation on indigenous communities, who, in his words, set fire to their lands “as part of their respective cultures and as a means of survival.”
This was vehemently refuted, however, by a recent peer-reviewed study published in the scientific journal PNAS, of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The paper came to the unsurprising conclusion that indigenous lands and protected areas actually serve as barriers against the rise of deforestation in the Amazon region.
As a simple illustration, despite making up over 50 percent of the area of the Amazon Basin, indigenous lands and protected territories are home to five times less deforestation than in the rest of the region.
Forest management has long been identified as a crucial aspect to help curb the effects of global climate...
Search
