Key Takeaways from Episode 8 of Rewilding Amazonia

• Global conservation targets actually move individual governments. James Deutsch describes watching the presidents of Gabon and Madagascar announce pledges to protect ten percent of their lands and waters in direct response to global biodiversity targets—evidence that international agreements, however imperfect, shape what individual leaders decide to do.
• Private conservation finance works through leverage, not scale. Rainforest Trust’s half-billion-dollar pledge helped catalyze five billion dollars from ten other donors, which in turn helped persuade 197 countries to agree to the 30×30 target in Montreal in 2022.
• Carbon finance has a structural flaw. Money flows to places where deforestation is high because that’s where emissions reductions are measurable, leaving countries and communities that have always protected their forests with nothing. The Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF) is an attempt to fix that by rewarding low deforestation rates instead.
• Law is not neutral. Constanza Prieto Figelist argues that every legal framework reflects a set of priorities, and across Latin America, those priorities have long favored economic extraction over ecological protection.
• Rights of nature can be recognized without a constitutional amendment. In Peru, a court recognized the Marañón River as a subject of rights using existing constitutional law, indigenous rights frameworks, and the American Convention of Human Rights.
• COP30 didn’t deliver binding targets or major new funding, but it put the Amazon at the center of the global climate conversation for the first time.
• Public mobilization is the pressure that makes legal and financial wins hold. Catarina Nefertari’s work with Amazônia de Pé is built on closing the distance between the communities most affected by the Amazon’s destruction and the rooms where decisions about its future are made.

The Long Game

In June 1992, 179 nations sent their leaders to Rio de Janeiro for the largest environmental summit in history. For two weeks, they negotiated, argued, and eventually agreed upon two landmark treaties that would govern how the world approached climate change and biodiversity management. The frameworks created at those meetings remain the scaffolding for nearly every international conservation agreement that has followed.

Three decades later, COP30 landed in Belém, Brazil, and for the first time, a climate conference was held inside a tropical rainforest. For the people who had spent their careers arguing that nature and climate were inseparable, it felt like a turning point.

But was it?

The people you’ve heard from throughout this series work in the field and in the lab. But where is the fate of that work decided? In boardrooms, courtrooms, and the streets.

Welcome to the series finale of Rewilding Amazonia. I’m Brooke Mitchell. Let’s discover what happens when policy meets reality.

James Deutsch: From Agreement to Action

The Moment That Set It All in Motion

The agreements get signed, pledges are made, the headlines move on, and somewhere between a conference hall and a forest floor, most of the money disappears.

James Deutsch has spent his career trying to close that gap by doing one thing very well: getting private money to the right place, at the right time, before the opportunity passes. James is the CEO of Rainforest Trust, an organization that has helped protect over 60 million acres across the tropics without owning a single acre. He grew up in New York City, and he told me about the moment that set his life’s work into motion.

James: “When I was nine years old, I went on a summer day nature camp and the counselor sat us down in the middle of these woods and pulled out a stick and started drawing in the dirt. He had just read this paper—around 1972—and described to us something brand new, called the Greenhouse Effect, that he said was going to ruin the world. Who knew that that’s what I would end up working in.”

James: “I studied philosophy as an undergraduate because I wanted to understand the meaning of life. But that pretty quickly got me into biology, because whether you wanted to understand the world, or understand yourself, or consciousness, or morality, it came down to biology and evolution. And that ended up putting me in Africa—teaching high school in Kenya, counting rhinos, studying antelopes for a PhD, then briefly detouring into HIV/AIDS fundraising during the height of the crisis on the continent.”

How a Number Agreed Upon by 197 Countries Changes What a President Does

I asked James to help me understand something I’d been mulling over since the beginning of this series: how a resolution passed in a conference hall becomes a protected area on the ground. His answer starts with the targets themselves—and why, counterintuitively, a number agreed upon by 197 countries can change what an individual president decides to do.

James: “I was impressed even way back when I was working twenty years ago for Wildlife Conservation Society to see those global targets affect the actual ambitions of individual leaders of countries. At that time I was working in Africa, and both the president of Gabon and the president of Madagascar announced pledges to protect ten percent of their lands and waters because of those kinds of global targets. So all of that came together as we approached 2020, and many of us realized there was a possibility we could get all the countries of the world to pledge to protect thirty percent of all the world’s land and thirty percent of all the world’s water by 2030. It finally happened in Montreal in 2022. And we see it impacting individuals. Right now we’re in touch with the presidents of Panama and Suriname, who are excited about expanding their country’s protected areas.”

Rainforest Trust’s role in getting there was deliberate, and it illustrates how private conservation finance can punch well above its weight when it’s used strategically.

James: “We pledged half a billion dollars—investment in saving the world’s most critical habitats, over ten years. But that pledge helped to inspire ten other donors to pledge a total of five billion dollars. And that helped to inspire the government of Germany and the European Union to increase their conservation funding. And all of that helped persuade 197 countries, finally in 2022, to agree to protect 30% of the world’s lands and oceans. It really is a snowball process—trying to leverage each pledge for something bigger.”

A Bridge Between Donors and the Ground

The way Rainforest Trust moves money is worth understanding, because it’s structurally different from how most people imagine large conservation organizations work.

James: “We are really a bridge between individual people who want to make the maximum positive difference to the world of nature that they can, with the resources they have, and the very best projects and partners and conservation leaders in the global south, in the tropics and subtropics, where most of the world’s biodiversity is. Our job is relatively simple: to bring those two groups of people together in a flawless partnership. Provide to the people investing the money the accountability and transparency and effectiveness that they want, and provide to the partners on the ground the resources and support and technical advice that they want. It’s a privileged position to be between these two other players who are far more important than we are.”

COP30: Less Than Hoped, More Than Nothing

COP30, which James did not attend, citing both the carbon cost of the flight and Belém’s limited hotel capacity, was where those two worlds were supposed to converge. His assessment of what came out of it was less than ideal, but with some notable positives.

James: “The conference in Belém didn’t make any real progress on the main issues of getting countries to agree to do stuff for climate, or getting really big government money, the best they could do was try to slow the decline in government money. But there were some exciting new developments, including Brazil putting together a new mechanism for funding countries to maintain their tropical rainforests, called the T Triple F. And there was real progress in engaging indigenous people and local communities more in climate change, both increasing the amount of funding that goes directly to indigenous peoples’ groups, and getting all parties to agree that indigenous people needed to play a key role.”

The Structural Flaw in Carbon Finance

The TFFF—Tropical Forests Forever Facility—addresses what James described as a structural flaw in how carbon money has always moved.

James: “Climate money, carbon money, is mainly available for places where there’s a lot of deforestation happening and you can reduce it, because if you can reduce the deforestation, you reduce the emissions. But a problem with that approach is that it doesn’t provide any money to places where deforestation has remained low. It doesn’t provide any money to countries and communities that are doing a good job and have always been doing a good job. From a conservation and a practical deforestation point of view, it’s crazy. And so T Triple F tries to get around that by creating a fund that would reward countries and communities that maintain a low deforestation rate. The verdict is still out. It’s still being worked on. Could still happen. Fingers crossed.”

While still in the early days, the facility is now moving from proposal to implementation, though its full scale will depend on reaching larger capitalization targets.

On the Withdrawal of US Government Funding

On the withdrawal of US government funding, which until recently was the largest single donor to global conservation, James was measured but honest.

James: “The largest donor to global conservation was the government of the United States and the people of the United States through its government. And most of that money has gone. So you are not alone in feeling depressed about that. Hopefully it’s not permanent. But it has caused and is causing a lot of damage around the world. And it’s also true that it’s not all gloom and doom. Private individuals continue to contribute. Foundations continue to contribute. People are looking for novel financial mechanisms like T Triple F, or leveraged combinations of different funds. As a result, we do see places where conservation is being set back by the sudden loss of the largest donor support, but maybe not as catastrophic as we feared. We’ll get through this together, I promise.”

Where the Answer Lies

All of the pledges, mechanisms, and targeted private capital ultimately run up against the same foundational question: who has the right to make decisions about the land being protected? James was direct about where he thinks the answer lies.

James: “The indigenous people from those places have the greatest moral claim to that land, and they also have the greatest tradition of acting as guardians and protectors of the forest. In those huge tropical forests, the way forward, almost invariably, is to strengthen the guardianship, the land tenure, the support of indigenous people and local communities to protect nature, and to prevent the land from being grabbed by people who want to turn it into industrial cattle production, industrial soy farms, industrial palm oil plantations, gold mines.”

It’s a vision that also shapes how he approaches his work on the hardest days.

James: “A lot of my attention is focused not on the places where the worst stuff is happening, but on the places where there’s a window of opportunity for great stuff to happen. I just got back from a mission to meet with the president of Suriname, a country that many of your listeners won’t have heard of. It’s the most forested country on earth, 93% forested. And no major new protected areas have been created there since 1998. There is a window.”

There is a window. For James, that’s enough to keep going.

Constanza Prieto Figelist: Speaking for Nature

The Amazon as Jurisdictions

Every protected area you’ve heard about in this series exists because someone established its legal status. Every community whose territory has been invaded was enabled by a legal framework that treated their land as available. The Amazon is not only a forest—it is many, many jurisdictions. And what happens inside courtrooms and legislatures across Latin America is, in Constanza Prieto’s view, every bit as consequential as what happens on the ground.

Constanza is a lawyer from Chile and the Legal Director for Latin America at the Earth Law Center, where she has spent eight years advancing rights of nature and ecocentric law across the region. She came to environmental law through human rights—an internship in indigenous peoples’ law in Washington DC that, as she put it, switched her mind completely. When I asked her to help us understand what role law plays in the Amazon, both in enabling destruction and in potentially stopping it, she started with something most people don’t think about.

Constanza: “Legislation and public policy and political decision play a really central role, because it’s not neutral. When citizens take a decision about who is taking decisions for us, this person is later deciding what is the priority in our country, in our ecosystem; what activities are permitted, what we want to protect, and who will take the decision in this environment. Everything happening is basically passed through the decision of us, and the decision makers who are elected.”

And those decision makers, across Latin America, are operating inside a system that has long been shaped by a single priority.

Constanza: “The economic system is shaping our legislation. Legislation is working for the economic system. It’s related to how we see nature — we see nature like a resource. The ecological value, the cultural value, the spiritual value — we don’t see these. We are consuming for today, but what are we going to do tomorrow?”

Two Ministries in Permanent Conflict

Constanza described the startling result: governments are trying to protect the forest while destroying it at the same time, through different ministries that have equal legal authority.

Constanza: “While the minister of environment is working in conservation areas, we have the minister of economy authorizing mining concessions. So there is this battle between two perspectives in permanent conflict in the region. In many of our constitutions, the priority of conservation of the environment is not reflected. And in many cases it goes to court to be resolved—what is the priority, conservation or extraction.”

When it does go to court, the communities most affected by extractive projects face another layer of the problem: their right to be consulted before a project begins on their land is recognized in law across much of Latin America, but routinely violated in practice.

Constanza: “In general, indigenous people have as a minimum the right to be consulted in case some kind of project can impact their territories. But in many cases that consultation doesn’t comply with the standards the Inter-American Court of Human Rights requires—for the interest of the companies, and also the interest of the state. And unfortunately, the destructive companies work to create separation between communities for economic interest, making it more difficult to reach consent altogether in the management of their land. And they are in many cases persecuted by the companies, but also criminalized by the state, because these big extractive companies are doing a project of national interest. So that national interest makes the indigenous people terrorists. Also criminals.”

Criminalized for defending land they have held for centuries, by governments that simultaneously recognize their right to it. It is the central legal contradiction Constanza navigates every day, and is why she has come to believe that the most important battles are not always the most dramatic ones.

Rights of Nature

Constanza: “The core of rights of nature is understanding that nature has intrinsic value, not only in benefit of humans, but also in benefit of nature itself. Bees have a value because they help pollinate endemic plants or trees of Amazonia. Rights of nature tries to bridge this philosophical concept into a legislative framework — creating specific rights for nature to exist and maintain its functions. Just as we have basic rights, nature has basic rights for itself and its own interests.”

The Marañón River Case

In Peru, where rights of nature don’t exist in the constitution, an indigenous federation of Kukama women did something unprecedented. They filed suit against the government and the state oil company Petro Peru over oil spills in the Marañón River. The court’s response surprised everyone.

Constanza: “The court decided to recognize the right of the Marañón River as a subject of rights, and also recognizing the Kukama women and other indigenous communities as guardians of the Marañón. Using constitutional law, the rights of indigenous people, and international law — the American Convention of Human Rights — legislation still played a very important role, even in a country where rights of nature are not written into the constitution.”

No constitutional amendment required. Only a judge willing to interpret the existing law in favor of the river. But winning in court is only the beginning.

Constanza: “Many cases — you win a case, and then where is the money to implement the decision? From what budget? I can say many cases where they named guardians, but the guardians have to support the work on their own. They don’t have any money to work. So it’s really difficult.”

Fighting for an Article

Hugo Jabini has been waiting nearly two decades for full compliance with his Inter-American Court ruling. Constanza knows that gap well, but she isn’t finished.

Constanza: “We need to fight even for an article, even for a principle. If we can do something small, something can change — a future decision, a future protection for a river. Just think about the four articles in the Constitution of Ecuador on rights of nature, and how many projects have been stopped. So yeah, I think it’s possible.”

A Seed Growing in Other Parts

The project giving her the most hope right now is not a lawsuit. It’s built around an Ashaninka community in Peru managing a communal reserve, combining their traditional knowledge, their cosmovision, and scientific data to create a declaration that could become a resolution, that could eventually become public policy.

Constanza: “I really like this project because I see how all this, the voice of indigenous people who have to be part of decision making, science influencing the creation of new legislation, data that is capital for decision makers, is connecting. In this project, it’s possible to see all these aspects working together in a positive way. Not always is it possible, but it brings me joy to see that it is. And I know in many countries, in many sections of the Amazon, they’re doing this kind of effort. I see how a seed starts growing in other parts.”

She closed our conversation with a reminder that what happens to the Amazon is not a technical problem. It is a choice.

Constanza: “The decisions are never neutral. Every species has a role and can be impacted by the decisions we make. The people we are electing, accepting as our decision makers,they are taking the decisions about the future of our ecosystems, the future of the next generation. We have to speak for nature. Nature needs us on many levels.”

Catarina Nefertari: Mobilizing a Nation

COP30 on the Ground

Legal victories and financial commitments mean little without public pressure, and building that sustained civic engagement, particularly among the communities living closest to the destruction, is where Catarina Nefertari focuses her work.

Catarina is a communications and mobilization manager at Amazônia de Pé, a civil society organization based in Belém whose mission is closing the distance between the people most impacted by the Amazon’s fate and the rooms where decisions about its future are made. When COP30 came to her city, that distance suddenly felt very small, and in certain ways, very large.

When I asked her what the experience felt like from the inside, she didn’t start with the negotiations; she started with her daughter’s school.

Catarina: “My daughter — her whole year, they had programming with the COP30 team. COP30 was in our lives, it was our lives last year. The city changed. There were a lot of constructions going on, the streets were different. It really changed our dynamic. And when COP30 started, it was on the ground — on the daily lives of Belém citizens.”

For Catarina, COP30 in Belém meant more than logistics. Amazon issues, she told me, are almost always treated as regional problems, and she’d spent years watching the international climate conversation look the other way.

Catarina: “We know that most of the time, Amazon and Brazil issues are not treated as a global thing to be faced. I face it as a regional issue. And we know that in COP spaces, regional issues are not addressed as good as they should. COP happening in the Amazon, in Brazil. It was a unique opportunity to spotlight what’s happening here. We need to worry about it, and we need to see what we can do.”

The Oil Dilemma

Outside the negotiating halls, that spotlight took a more confrontational form. The protests Catarina described weren’t abstract—they were organized around a specific and urgent dispute happening inside Brazil right now.

Catarina: “Here in Brazil we are facing this big dilemma — the exploration of oil. Even though the world is trying to phase out fossil fuels, here in Brazil fossil fuels are not our main cause of greenhouse gas emissions. Our main cause is deforestation. And the Brazilian government really wants to explore more fossil fuels to develop the country — in an area of the Amazon called Foz Amazônica. And there’s a lot of technical issues to do it because it’s really close to conservation areas.”

Inside the Negotiating Halls

Inside the negotiating halls, the picture was harder to read. Catarina had been following the process closely with civil society groups from across Brazil, and she came away with more than she expected—and in other ways, less.

Catarina: “If we look at the whole picture, we didn’t have great advances. But if we look for what we can hold onto — I think COP30 made a lasting legacy. This will be a COP that marks a moment when people were part of COP. People were on the streets. People were living the city because COP30 was happening, with programming all over the city. Civil society was really involved. And when we make people part of the discussion, we can see what they are facing. We can see the diversity of problems on their territory.”

Participation as legacy is harder to measure than a signed agreement or a funding pledge, and Catarina holds it alongside a very specific frustration about who the COP process reaches, and who it consistently leaves out.

Who Are We Mobilizing?

Catarina: “Who do we want to mobilize? People who have a lot of money, or people who study at public schools and are facing social-economic issues in their houses? The most impacted people in climate change issues are the youth, the peripheral youth, the children, the moms, the women. And mobilizing them requires us to be aware of what they need. We want climate majority — but we need to understand the challenges youth are facing so we can empathize with them. Then they will get closer and we will mobilize.”

Before COP30, her team worked with young leaders from all five regions of Brazil to develop climate narratives in their own words, distributed nationally on Amazon Day in September, reaching people on their own terms.

When I asked what COP30 had ultimately delivered, she didn’t pretend it was enough.

Catarina: “I think it’s a great legacy that we make people part of the discussion. But when it comes to the solution parts — we need to believe in the COP process, because it is a space that exists and happens every year. Although it’s really frustrating to see the timing. Brazil did a big effort to guarantee consensus. The president did a big effort to mobilize civil society. But we couldn’t see the advances we wanted to see.”

Catarina believes in the process and is honest about its limits. This work demands faith without illusion, and is perhaps what sustains people over the long haul.

What It Takes

Over the past six months, I sat down with 22 people across six countries—scientists, lawyers, activists, community leaders, wildlife rescuers, and practitioners who have dedicated their lives to this forest. None of them alone holds the answer. But together, in the work they are doing across every scale and border of the Amazon Basin, the answer is taking shape.

Andrés Ruzo: “The conquistadors were so focused on the gold, on the short term monetary asset, that they missed that beautiful jungle that was in front of them.”

There is wonder in this forest that no extraction spreadsheet can account for.

Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: “Losing a culture — I see it almost as losing part of the human’s memory. How can we better act in terms of future or changing realities if we don’t understand the past? It’s not just a culture, it’s not just a language that we’re losing — it’s connected to something deeper. And that’s what’s so scary.”

And there are people who have been carrying that memory for generations, long before anyone called it conservation.

Brian Griffiths: “When I’m out in the forest with them — hearing their stories, and as we’re falling asleep at night in our tents, hearing them share stories amongst themselves about animals they saw while hunting the night before — it’s just a joyful environment. That gives me a lot of hope. They remind me why it’s important to do this work. When my alarm goes off at four in the morning and it’s time to hit the trail, I’m excited to do so. And that’s because of their passion and commitment.”

And then there is the question of what we are actually protecting it for.

Eduardo Nycander: “Think about the beauty of this world and think about the next generations. Your kids are going to see that beauty. Your grandkids are going to enjoy this beauty. If the answer is not, then it’s not fair. So try to do something fair now for the next generations.”

And then, there is what it means to never give up.

Hugo Jabini: “My inspiration comes from the fact that my ancestors managed to flee from the plantation, enter the unknown forest, and maintain autonomous communities — that we still have today, with our land, our language, our culture, our governance structure. We are warriors. But we are also winners. We will always win.”

The Amazon is a forest, a weather system, a home, and the most biodiverse place on the planet. The ground is shifting in both directions at once, toward collapse in some regions and toward restoration in others. The people in this series, and thousands more, are why rewilding the Amazon is still possible.