The Amazon Basin and the Role of Conservation and Sustainable Management

The Amazon⁴ is one of the most diverse ecological regions representing 40 percent of the planet’s remaining rainforest. It plays a fundamental role in global and regional climate cycles, storing 150-200 tons of carbon.⁵ The Amazon basin discharges almost 20 percent of the global surface river flows.⁶ It is one of the largest repositories of biodiversity in the world - one in ten known plant and animal species lives in the Amazon. The region includes 563 protected areas and 6,443 indigenous territories, accounting for 24.6 percent and 27.5 percent of its surface area, respectively. Over 47 million people live in the Amazon, including 410 indigenous groups⁷ – 82 of which are in voluntary isolation -, with many deriving their livelihoods from its forests, rivers, and abundance of natural resources. Given its unique characteristics, the Amazon is critical for the world’s environmental, social, and economic well-being.

The Amazon’s water and forests are threatened by deforestation, land degradation, contamination, ecosystem fragmentation, and the over-exploitation of natural resources. Since 1985, close to 75 million hectares of natural vegetation cover – approximately 17 percent⁸ of the Amazon – have been lost as a result of multiple activities, including expansive agriculture, illegal mining, and unsustainable infrastructure.⁹ Deforestation remains a challenge for the region, even with national and international commitments to reach net zero deforestation targets. More than 1.98 million hectares of primary forest loss occurred in 2022, the second highest on record,¹⁰ however a decrease in deforestation during 2023 could indicate positive trends. Experts still warn that the Amazon could be close to a tipping point in which the rainforest would turn into a fire-prone, dry savanna, estimated when deforestation levels reach 20-25 percent¹¹ – only another 3-8 percent from current loss.

Governments from the Amazon countries are striving to rebuild their economies, greatly disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and satisfy the development needs of their populations while addressing the interlinked climate and biodiversity crises. Coordinated action is urgently needed to attain sustainable development in the Amazon and to avoid the tipping point. Some within the financial and banking sector have decreased their investments in harmful industries, redirecting it to nature-based solutions, while international organizations and foundations have ramped up their ambition and funding towards the region. The scientific community, national research institutions, and groups like the Science Panel for the Amazon,¹² are working to promote, disseminate, and scale solutions at the regional level for integrated conservation and sustainable development. Multilateral organizations are agreeing on common goals as demonstrated by the memorandum of understanding signed between the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Finally, national governments have continued to indicate interest in conserving the Amazon’s forests and waters, delivering joint coordinated action with support from a strengthened Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), and as shown through the signing of the Belem Declaration¹³ during the 2023 Amazon Summit in Brazil. This study comes at a time in which the Amazon is consistently being discussed in national and international forums, and global actors meet to determine funding allocations to conserve the world’s natural resources.

ABOUT THE AMAZON SUSTAINABLE LANDSCAPES PROGRAM

Recognizing the urgency to curb deforestation and harness a regional approach to address the increasing threats in the Amazon, the GEF approved the ASL to improve integrated management and ecosystem conservation in priority areas of the Amazon in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, and Suriname.¹⁴ The ASL includes a regional Amazon Coordination Technical Assistance project led by the World Bank and designed to support capacity building and collaboration among national projects towards common goals. This objective is achieved through fostering intergovernmental, multi-sectoral and multiagency cooperation, tracking program-level progress, promoting south-south learning and capacity building opportunities, and developing communication and awareness-raising strategies.

One of the key activities entrusted to this regional project is to facilitate donor coordination in the Amazon. To date the ASL coordination team has developed a donor funding analysis in the Amazon covering the 2016-2019 period, as well as a publication on lessons learned in effective donor collaboration using six case studies from the Amazon. In addition, the ASL has facilitated the Amazon technical donor working group through regular meetings between all types of donors working toward conservation and sustainable development in the region. This study is part of that effort to enhance collaboration among donors active in the Amazon.

About this Report: Tracking Funding within the Amazon, 2007 – 2022

In 2014 and 2017, the GBMF commissioned two studies to identify the funding flows for conservation in the Amazon region (Castro de la Mata and Riega-Campos, 2014; Strelneck and Vilela, 2017). Building on these studies, the ASL coordination team conducted the third analysis to provide an updated assessment of international support for conservation in the Amazon covering the 2016-2019 period. These reports established an important dataset for the donor community and others to understand the amount of non-reimbursable finance flowing to the region, and which countries, recipients, and strategies are on the receiving end. With this fourth analysis, the ASL coordination team is again updating the data with the current study's objective to provide an overview of global donor resources that have been approved and distributed across the Amazon to strengthen and promote conservation of its natural resources by collecting and quantifying non-reimbursable funding towards conservation from 2020 to 2022 (see Table 1 for an overview of these studies).

This new study maintains the same methodology and format as the 2017 and 2021 studies to provide continuity and facilitate a deeper understanding of the multiple donors active in the region; how funding has changed over time; and how donors direct their funding by country, grantee, and strategy.¹⁵ This study also includes another methodology, not used in the previous iterations, that was added as an annex due to feedback received from multiple donors during the data collection and analysis. The former, “Methodology by Distributions”, divides funding commitments evenly across the number of award years to estimate investment across the years, such that the total award value of each grant is not applied to the single year the grant was approved. The latter, “Methodology by Awards” is the one added just for this study, whose results are in Annex 1, and which attributes the total value of each grant award to the year the grant was approved and does not divide funding awards across the duration approved for the project.

The ability to view funding trends provides important insights into donors’ interests and priorities, but to track this funding is complex as it requires mapping a spread of resources across multiple countries from a wide range of donors, including bilateral agencies, multilateral agencies, private foundations, and NGOs, with money passing through multiple players before reaching the ground in many instances. To further complicate the collection of funding data, donors have different approaches, procedures, processes, cycles, and systems, which required significant time and dialogue to sort through.

This analysis acknowledges these complexities and intends to provide critical information for decision making on grant funding. The process to prepare the analysis and discuss it among donors aims to promote dialogue between them and other relevant actors in the region, facilitate collaboration to avoid duplication of efforts, and find synergies with the ultimate goal of maximizing the impact of their investments.