- A new agreement announced at the COP30 climate talks in Brazil intends to unify countries and institutions from around the world to monitor and protect the Amazon Rainforest.
- The Mamirauá Declaration aims to develop a streamlined framework that will unify various long-term efforts to streamline data gathering and analysis.
- The agreement focuses on the active participation of Indigenous peoples and local communities in monitoring; it also calls for more capacity building in countries in the Amazon Basin.
A new agreement that aims to streamline the monitoring and protection of the Amazon Rainforest was announced at the COP30 climate summit that wrapped up this week in Belém, Brazil.
The Mamirauá Declaration is “a collective commitment to transform how biodiversity is monitored, governed and protected across the Amazon Basin.” Thirty organizations from around the world — including Brazil-based research organization the Mamirauá Institute, <Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, BarcelonaTech (UPC) in Spain, and U.S.-based New York University and XPRIZE Foundation — signed the agreement at an event on the sidelines of COP30. The first two organizations led the efforts to coordinate and promote the declaration.
“The declaration is a call to bring together governments, NGOs, Indigenous people and local communities and the private sector together to measure the pulse of the forest,” Emiliano Ramalho, technical scientific director at the Mamirauá Institute, told Mongabay in a video interview. “Looking from above, you can say the forest is there, but to see if it is pulsing or not, you need to go there and monitor, and that is the key idea of the declaration.”
Under a unified framework, the declaration aims to bring together long-term but scattered initiatives that have been monitoring the Amazon Rainforest for years. One of its biggest highlights is the active participation of Indigenous peoples and local communities in monitoring efforts. The declaration also calls for more capacity building in the countries that make up the Amazon Basin.
“It’s usually institutions from the Global North getting data from the Global South, and analyzing that data,” Ramalho said. “We have to promote data being analyzed locally, and infrastructure being built locally with community-based organizations and national research institutions.”
While the mechanism for the framework was built out in the past few months, its foundation lies in a cross-border, interdisciplinary project that has installed sensors across Brazil, Peru and Bolivia to monitor biodiversity by gathering images, audio and other environmental data. The Providence Project was one of the six finalists at the XPRIZE Rainforest Competition, a $10 million contest to identify technologies that could automate the monitoring of rainforests. The five-year competition culminated last year.
“This allowed us to integrate complementary techniques into our own approach,” Michel André, director of the Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, BarcelonaTech (UPC), told Mongabay in a video interview. “Our long-term biodiversity monitoring work in Mamirauá reinforced the conviction that we could scale this model up and promote it as a unified framework to address the challenges facing the Amazon Rainforest.”
The declaration, which is open for other organizations from around the world to sign, will be rolled out in three phases. The first is to understand the governance of existing efforts. “We now need to build the operational structure, a step that will take approximately one to two years to complete,” André said.
This will be followed by its implementation at national levels, following which it will be implemented around the Amazon in a streamlined fashion.
However, there are challenges in the path ahead.
For one, raising sufficient funds to do this at scale is no easy feat. It will also require the herculean task of trying to bring countries together to work in a coordinated manner. “What we’re talking about is a lot of diplomacy and multilateralism,” Ramalho said. “So, one of the challenges is to get everybody on the same page.”
Both Ramalho and André, however, expressed hope that it will all come together in the coming years.
Five years from now, “I hope to show you a platform where you can see any information you want about the biodiversity in the Amazon,” Ramalho said. “And know what’s happening under the canopy in real time.”
Banner image: Lowland tapir in the Amazon region of Ecuador. Image by ©Julie Larsen.
Abhishyant Kidangoor is a staff writer at Mongabay. Find him on 𝕏 @AbhishyantPK.
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