Policy

Spiralling frontier threats in Indigenous Amazonia
Indigenous Lands hold back Amazon deforestation, yet Brazil’s buffer-zone protections cover conservation units and not Indigenous territories, exposing their edges to extraction and drug trafficking. Satellite forest-loss records from 2008 to 2024 were compared inside the Vale do Javari Indigenous Land, noted for its tri-border setting and its large population living in voluntary isolation, and in zones out to 200 kilometers. Clearing there surged from 2017 to 2022, in 2022 running nearly 187.5 times the loss inside the territory, and 64% fell within holdings on the national rural land registry, misused to claim public land. It eased in 2023 and 2024 yet stayed well above the previous decade.
Gabriel de Oliveira, Erin Koster, Beto Marubo, Livia Maira Orlandi Laureto, Carlos A. Nobre, Beatriz M. Funatsu, Rachel Geber-Corrêa, Cléo Quaresma Dias-Júnior, Deborah Delgado Pugley, Zoe Amie Pierrat, Marco Heredia-R, Douglas Christopher Morton, Amanda Hoffman-Hall, Lucas Maure, Qianlai Zhuang, Torsten Krause, Taciana de Carvalho Coutinho, Guilherme Mataveli, Nathaniel A. Brunsell, Leonardo G. Ziccardi, Imelda K. Moise, Trent Biggs, Scott C. Stark, João Gilberto de Souza Ribeiro, Irene Carniatto, Polyanna da Conceição Bispo, Paulo César de Godoy Junior, Fabien H. Wagner, Helber Barros Gomes, Alecsander Mergen, Fernando De Sales, Alberto Dresch Webler, Caitlyn E. Sutherlin, Celso Augusto Guimarães Santos, Alan Cavalcanti da Cunha, Wilderclay Barreto Machado, Katyelle Ferreira da Silva Bezerra, Eliezer Augusto Litaiff de São Paulo Aguiar, Carlos Antonio Costa dos Santos, Rodrigo Lilla Manzione, Noemi Vergopolan, J. Christopher Brown, Domênica B. de Melo, Eduardo Eiji Maeda, Jório Bezerra Cabral Júnior, Helenilza Ferreira Albuquerque Cunha, Andre Lima, Angela Abascal, Michel E. D. Chaves, Jeferson Alberto de Lima, Ricardo Dalagnol, Vanessa Boanada Fuchs, Matheus Henrique Nunes, Gilberto Fisch, Nara Luisa Reis de Andrade, Hewlley M. Acioli Imbuzeiro, Liana O. Anderson, Damien Arvor, Marcelo Zeri, Lennart Olsson, Celso Von Randow, Mateus Batistella, Paulo Moutinho, Jean Pierre Ometto, Philip M. Fearnside, Paulo Artaxo
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Spiralling frontier threats in Indigenous Amazonia