In New York, indigenous leaders call for Amazon protections at Climate Week

With the United Nations General Assembly being held at the organization’s headquarters in New York City for days of meetings and speeches, the city’s traditional Climate Week is also going ahead over the next seven days — having been organized in parallel with UNGA every year since 2009. And, unsurprisingly, protecting the Amazon will be high on the event’s agenda.

Indigenous representatives of the so-called Amazonia for Life Initiative will take part in a number of engagements throughout the week, intensifying calls for their “80×25” agenda, which calls for the protection of 80 percent of the Amazon by 2025, in a bid to avoid reaching a tipping point in the largest carbon sink on the planet. 

The tipping point argument points out that portions of the Amazon basin have become so degraded that they risk seeing a process of dieback, before gradually being transformed into savannas.

Studies show that while climate change has much to do with this process, human actions such as deforestation, forest fires, the construction of hydroelectric dams on large rivers, and altering the water dynamics of the basin further intensify degradation.

A recent report from the Amazonia for Life Initiative points out that protecting 80 percent of the basin is still feasible by 2025: 74 percent of the biome is still standing, while the estimate that the remaining 6 percent can be sufficiently restored.

The initiative is supported by COICA, Stand.earth, RAISG, AVAAZ, Amazon Watch, Wild Heritage, Re:Wild, One Earth, Earth Insight, and COIA, and more than 1,200 organizations that signed the declaration of support for the goal since 2021, and about 50 regional indigenous organizations in Amazon countries.

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