Indigenous territories maintain Amazon forest just as well as protected areas, study finds

A new study has found that in Ecuador’s Amazon, Indigenous territories without formal conservation contracts maintained forest conditions just as well as formal protected areas. Ecuador has three different approaches to forest governance: Forests protected by government institutions, forests managed by local communities under formal conservation agreements and Indigenous territories without formal conservation agreements. To find out the state of forests under these different policies, researchers used satellite data to examine three metrics: Long-term changes in vegetation greenness as an indication of degradation or improvement in forest cover; abrupt changes in forest condition due to more acute disturbances like human settlements, roads and agricultural fields; and how forest productivity responded to the 2015-2016 El Niño drought — a climate phenomenon that causes extreme changes in rainfall and temperature patterns. They found that community-protected forests performed best overall in some measures, particularly resilience after drought. These forests were under formal contracts such as a Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) program, which provides communities with financial incentives to refrain from any commercial activity that disturbs the natural forest. However, Indigenous territories without similar formal conservation agreements and who can use natural resources for subsistence and cultural preservation also had forest condition patterns comparable to the other governance regimes. In fact, they had the greatest proportion of areas showing positive long-term trends in vegetation greenness. “From a practical perspective, our results suggest that conservation is not only about drawing lines on a map,” lead author Fernando Troya, currently based in Ecuador, who conducted…This article was originally published on

Mongabay