Reimagining the Amazon bioeconomy from environmental justice and post-growth perspectives

The Amazon rainforest has long been at the center of extractive and colonial interventions to fuel domestic and international economic growth. Over the years, land development for logging, mining, farming, and infrastructure has led to the irreversible or high degradation of one-quarter of the world’s largest rainforest.1 In the Brazilian Amazon, the early 2000s saw record-breaking land clearing rates, prompting the federal government to implement measures that successfully dropped deforestation by 83%.2 Yet, recent domestic political crises, institutional shocks, and the COVID-19 pandemic have reversed these governance achievements, leading to a resurgence of deforestation in the Amazon over the past decade (Figure 1). With substantial ecosystem degradation, the Amazon is nearing an irreversible “tipping point,” where the region will transition from being a carbon sink to becoming a carbon source.3 Such environmental shifts pose drastic threats not only to global climate stability but also to the livelihoods of 867.9 thousand Indigenous people from hundreds of ethnic groups who have been the stewards of the Brazilian Amazon landscapes for thousands of years.4 The Brazilian Amazon urgently requires transformative measures to address pressing ecological, economic, and justice challenges.