- Slowing and reversing deforestation and land degradation in the Amazon requires not only conservation efforts but also increasing the economic value of standing primary forests through a bioeconomy approach, argues Robert Muggah, co-founder of Instituto Igarapé.
- A bioeconomy involves regenerative agriculture, sustainable energy, and other activities that leverage the forest’s natural assets while ensuring economic benefits for local communities. However, the expansion of the bioeconomy faces challenges, including resistance from extractive sectors, investment risks, and the need for infrastructure, research, and support for local enterprises.
- Despite these hurdles, advancing the bioeconomy is essential for sustainable development and decarbonization in the Amazon and crucial for the world, says Muggah.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily Mongabay.
Teeming with tropical rainforest, the Amazon Basin is a vital defense against global warming. Yet deforestation combined with extreme weather are behind the region’s worst drought in fifty years. Forest clearance to make way for cattle and soy are disrupting micro-climates. Warmer temperatures, spurred on by El Nino, are reducing rainfall and drying out plants and soil. As a result, some of the Amazon’s major rivers and tributaries are at the lowest level in over a century, stranding millions of people living in remote towns and villages. If searing temperatures and deforestation persist, parts of the region could experience a “tipping point” turning rainforest into savannah. Since the Amazon holds 150 billion metric tons of carbon — equivalent to over ten times annual global greenhouse gas emissions – the implications extend far beyond the Americas.
The Amazon is hardly the only part of the world affected by extreme heat. The entire planet is warming. The ten hottest years since records began have all occurred in the past decade. And 2023 was the hottest year ever reported. Rising temperatures, climate change, and biodiversity loss are pushing the world’s vital ecosystems to the brink, with scientists warning that six of nine key planetary boundaries are already breached. Protecting and conserving rainforests is crucial to bringing the planet back into balance, but doing so requires a change of mindset. It means not just protecting and conserving forests and biodiversity, but also investing in the rule of law and rolling out new economic models that offer viable alternatives to deforestation. Nowhere is this change of mindset more urgently needed than in the Amazon.
Spanning over eight million square kilometers and eight countries, the Amazon Basin is the world’s largest tropical rainforest. It is also profoundly affected by environmental crimes such as land theft, selective logging, illegal gold mining and extractive industries ranging from ranching to agriculture in protected areas. Over 95 percent of all deforestation in the Amazon is illegal, much of it connected to foreign and domestic industries and the 45 million people who live in the region. While the recently elected government of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has helped slow forest clearance in Brazil, researchers believe that parts of the Amazon Basin have already started tipping. If illegal deforestation and the development models that incentivize it persist, the region’s 2050 carbon emissions will be five times higher than the threshold set by the Paris climate agreement.
Slowing and reversing deforestation and land degradation cannot be achieved through conservation alone, but also by increasing the economic value of standing primary forests. The key is to figure out how the millions of people living in and depending on the Amazon can profit from protecting nature. Decarbonizing and conserving the Amazon requires both security guarantees to de-risk territory and market incentives to attract responsible investment. In addition to improved land tenure and better law enforcement are nature based solutions, including the “bioeconomy.” Very generally, the bioeconomy includes regenerative agriculture, livestock, and fishing; sustainable timber and non-timber cultivation; green- and renewable-energy production; sustainable biomaterials (including pesticides, fertilizers, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals); eco-tourism and related services; sustainable fashion and textiles; and services based on carbon capture and biological and environmental conservation.
There is growing enthusiasm globally in the potential of growing the bioeconomy, including in many countries spanning the Amazon Basin. A Pan-Amazonian Conference on Bioeconomy in Belem, Brazil, last year assembled hundreds of experts from across the region. A Presidential Summit also generated a Belem Declaration that stressed the importance of a viable green economy – a bioeconomy – to slow deforestation. This is not “feel-good” environmentalism; the potential economic dividends are considerable. Fully implementing a bioeconomy approach could potentially help Brazil to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 550 million tons and generate $284 billion per year by 2050. The scaffolding of the region’s bioeconomy is the process of being built, and needs to be accelerated.
Brazil has long explored the potential of a bioeconomy, but progress must be sped-up. Over the past decade, a series of bioeconomy strategies have been proposed and the country’s national development bank, BNDES, has increased funding to bioeconomy projects. While the government has yet to finalize a national plan, a host of subnational and private initiatives have emerged to grow segments of the bioeconomy. For example, in late 2022, Para’s presented a PlanBio bioeconomy plan at COP27 valued at $232 million until 2028. It established a state-owned regional bank called Banpara to support small businesses and begin incubating higher-value bio-based products. Companies such as Natura have also started piloting blended financing projects such as “Amazonia Viva” to stimulate local cooperatives in the Amazon.
Aside from a few enlightened businesses, however, there is stiff resistance to the bioeconomy from many extractive sectors, including interest groups that feel threatened by any shift from the status quo. Many investors also still need convincing, fearful of the risks of investing in complex settings such as the Amazon. Scaling it up will require sustained research and due diligence, accessible infrastructure and patient capital, and new, resilient supply chains. Financial support and technical assistance also needs to flow to local start-ups in high value-added products, promising bio-enterprises, and local producers and harvesters at all levels of the value chain. Safeguards to protect the intellectual property of bioproducts and genetic resources are crucial, as are strategies that ensure respectful knowledge sharing with indigenous and traditional communities.
Expanding this model requires stronger connections between bioeconomy scholars, entrepreneurs, and investors which is why the Igarapé Institute and the Inter-American Development Bank have mapped the communities working on related issues across the region. Some of the most advanced clusters are located in Brazil and Colombia, including comparatively comprehensive, well-targeted bioeconomy policies and programs. Both countries have rapidly evolving productive sectors that are pursuing scientific and technological priorities, while also harnessing the valuable experiences and contributions of traditional communities. Ecuador and Peru are less advanced despite many government-led efforts to promote “bio-business” and “bio-innovation” in certain sectors. By contrast, Bolivia and Venezuela have resisted using the term “bioeconomy” altogether, and remain more focused on smaller-scale initiatives to address food security and specific inputs like biofertilizers. And in Guyana and Suriname, incipient low-carbon and green-economy strategies are confronting a powerful, entrenched fossil-fuel lobby.
Notwithstanding competing definitions of the bioeconomy, there are several fundamental principles shared by all countries that can be built upon. Researchers across the region agree that the bioeconomy includes activities that make use of biological resources and typically involve innovations in science and technology. There is also consensus that the bioeconomy involves activities that incorporate insights and expertise from ancestral and traditional knowledge while promoting value-added through processing and supply chain efficiency. And there is a hard consensus that the bioeconomy incorporates processes that promote decarbonization, environmental services, and the replacement of fossil fuel-based products with sustainable alternatives.
The shift from environmentally extractivist to green growth production models in the Amazon is not just a national or even regional strategic imperative. It is a matter of human survival for everyone. The pivot to a regional bioeconomy is one of several potentially game-changing nature-based strategies. And while the bioeconomy holds enormous potential, it also faces risks from environmental crime and legacy industries. It is possible to build a green economy in the Amazon that benefits both the forest and its inhabitants, while also making major contributions to decarbonization. This starts by building awareness of the economic dividends that nature is capable of paying.