Protecting the Amazon rainforest and our climate in solidarity with Indigenous peoples

Since 1996, Amazon Watch has defended the Amazon rainforest and our climate in solidarity with Indigenous peoples. Long-term partnerships with Indigenous, forest, and traditional peoples — the best stewards of the rainforest — are the foundation for Amazon Watch’s campaigns for climate justice, corporate accountability, and the permanent protection of the rainforest.

The Amazon is home to more than 500 distinct Indigenous peoples. As our planet’s largest tropical rainforest, it stabilizes our global climate and an immense amount of Earth’s biodiversity and flowing freshwater can be found there.

This vital ecosystem and the Indigenous peoples who have stewarded it for centuries face grave threats from deforestation, resource extraction, land grabs, and destructive development projects. The Amazon is facing a tipping point and won't be able to sustain itself as a rainforest if we remain on our current path of destruction.

To move to a turning point, Amazon Watch is advancing the Indigenous-led proposal to permanently protect 80% of the Amazon by securing Indigenous rights to their ancestral territories, challenging the major drivers of rainforest destruction, and mobilizing solidarity funds directly to Indigenous Earth Defenders throughout the Amazon Basin. Their work combines on-the-ground legal, advocacy, and communications expertise and long-term trusted partnerships with Indigenous peoples and organizations.

🌳Amazon Watch’s Amazon Defenders Fund (ADF) provides direct solidarity funding to Amazonian peoples and organizations free of bureaucratic barriers. The ADF supports Indigenous-led initiatives including community organizing, women’s leadership, communal economies, protection of Earth Defenders at risk for resisting destructive development, and crisis response including to wildfires and oil spills. The ADF is built upon a multi-decade track record as a trusted partner among Indigenous nations. You can learn more at amazonwatch.org/get-involved/amazon-defenders-fund.