Innovating for Conservation: Protecting More Forests, More Sustainably

December 17, 2024

For 25 years, we’ve been working with local partners, communities, and governments in the Amazon to provide technical support that will help strengthen sustainable land use and establish new protected areas, keeping forests intact and wildlife thriving. Through multiple analyses (including MAAP #183 and a recent carbon analysis from MAAP #213), we have shown that protected areas and Indigenous territories offer some of the best defenses against deforestation. 

Protected areas encompass key ecosystems that are essential for the health of the overall Amazon, which affects the entire planet. Key protected areas we’ve helped establish lend a hand in conserving key ecological corridors that ensure connectivity to protect biodiversity and species adaptation to a warming planet, regulate water levels and flooding to protect watershed health for the entire Amazon River basin, and build forests that are more fire resilient, which can prevent major fires that devastate the Amazon and local communities.

Achieving greater protection of the Amazon’s forests is more urgent now than ever. 

Take action for the Amazon today!

Establishing conservation areas takes a lot of time and work, and we are grateful for your generous support. We at Amazon Conservation continue to utilize innovative tools and partnerships to protect new areas and ensure their continued protection.

In addition to the importance of protected areas and Indigenous territories as tools to prevent deforestation, establishing more and larger areas for conservation also supports landscape and biodiversity connectivity, which is critical for healthy forests and ecosystems. 

This year, we celebrated the establishment of two new conservation areas that protect more than 1.25 million acres of forest in the Bolivian Amazon.

Thanks to the support of donors like you, we now directly protect a total of 10.5 MILLION ACRES of wild places across 37 protected areas across the headwaters of the Amazon in Peru and Bolivia! 

But establishing protected areas won’t be effective on its own without also ensuring the sustainable management of these areas, which is another piece of Amazon Conservation’s work to protect wild areas.

We are at the forefront of urgent action by using real-time satellite monitoring, locally-managed drone piloting programs, and innovative tools like the Fires App, through which we track fires and analyze their causes and their correlation with destructive activities. With this valuable data and by fostering healthy, connected ecosystems, we are making forests more resilient to the impacts of these fires. 

Your support for Amazon Conservation’s work helps prioritize the innovative use of technology to ensure connectivity and the sustainability of protected areas needed to conserve biodiversity and healthy forests resilient to climate change.

Images provided by Conservación Amazónica – ACEAA