The tragedy of the Amazon

Despite its importance, the Amazon does not have a solid supranational institution to ensure its protection. The Amazon is the largest tropical forest on the planet, covering an area of more than seven million square kilometers. It maintains the regional rainfall cycle, is home to nearly 10% of the world’s biodiversity, and is the ancestral territory of hundreds of indigenous peoples.  The entities responsible for protecting it are eight countries (Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, and Suriname), which act under the logic of national sovereignty, and many of the international cooperation rules on its preservation are merely symbolic. 

The largest international cooperation effort in the Amazon is the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), which was created in 1995 to implement the objectives of the Treaty, signed in 1978. Both the Treaty and the ACTO began as instruments of cooperation for the development of the Amazon basin and the preservation of natural resources through technical cooperation, information exchange, and the implementation of joint projects.  The ACTO is responsible for the management of water resources, biodiversity, indigenous peoples, health, forests, and climate change. However, this body functions as a forum for intergovernmental dialogue, without supranational powers or binding decision-making authority. It has no independent monitoring, sanctioning, or verification mechanisms, and its decisions are at the mercy of the political will of the governments of the member states. In addition, its technical and financial capacity is limited, so its role is confined to formulating specific projects and exchanging information, without any major impact on national policies. 

For their part, the member states have failed to agree on a joint agenda for the protection of this territory and, worse still, each has a different conception of the Amazon, both from a biogeographical and a political-administrative point of view. Colombia, Brazil, and Peru have had governments with an extractivist and militaristic view of the Amazon, which see the forest as a complex territory with actors that are difficult to identify and areas co-opted by illegal actors. This means that territorial control policies, based on the intervention of their forces, take precedence over any environmental agenda. This varies depending on the government; for example, in Brazil, during the administration of Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022), the Amazon faced a major environmental setback: oversight agencies were dismantled, the protection of indigenous territories was discouraged, and discourses were promoted that legitimized the illegal expansion of extractive activities. In contrast, Lula’s administration has sought to reposition Brazil as a global environmental leader, strengthening enforcement and adopting a protectionist discourse focused on biome conservation and climate justice. However, ACTO has no power to give its opinion on these military interventions or on extractivist policies.

ACTO’s role is limited to issuing statements of goodwill and promoting technical cooperation, but without the legal or political tools to enforce compliance, monitor commitments, or sanction noncompliance. This institutional weakness perpetuates the fragmentation of cooperation among Amazonian states and allows short-term economic and military interests to prevail over the protection of the forest. In practice, the Amazon remains unprotected against threats that require urgent regional coordination, such as accelerated deforestation, illegal mining, and the loss of ecological connectivity. The best way to protect the environment is through binding policies and institutions with operational authority and regulatory power.

In any case, cooperation between member states would not be enough to protect the Amazon. The global climate crisis, a result of the capitalist model, has deepened the inequality between the countries that have historically contributed most to global warming and those that, like the Amazonian countries, suffer its effects disproportionately. According to the Global Atmospheric Research Emissions Database, more than 75% of current CO₂ emissions come from just 20 countries, led by China (30.1%), the United States (11.25%), India (7.8%), and the European Union (6.08%). Historically, developed countries have emitted around 85% of the CO₂ accumulated since the Industrial Revolution. In contrast, countries such as Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia have contributed much less to global warming but face severe consequences: alterations in water cycles, droughts, loss of biodiversity, forest fires, and direct impacts on indigenous and rural communities. 

This is exacerbated by the fact that the countries most affected by climate change, which have contributed least to causing it, do not have the capacity to influence the international system due to the inequality of political and negotiating power resulting from the capitalist system. The Amazon is also a victim of this inequality: despite its vital role in the planet’s climate stability, Amazonian countries have little influence on global policy and bear the burden of conserving an indispensable ecosystem, without having contributed to its deterioration. The international community has tried to reduce this gap without much success. Since 1992, the United Nations has recognized this inequality with the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” that countries have in environmental degradation. Since then, it has contributed to the adaptation of the countries most vulnerable to climate change (including those in the Amazon) with adaptation projects and plans, but this has not been and will not be enough. 

Until now, all agreements to mitigate the climate crisis have been voluntary commitments, with no consequences for non-compliance or reprisals if the current leader decides to withdraw. The non-binding nature of these agreements runs counter to studies that have shown that only countries that adopt strict climate crisis mitigation policies achieve real reductions in their emissions. In this context, any global climate agreement that does not impose real obligations on the main polluters is doomed to fail. 

The Amazon is a victim of the overestimation of the state as an entity capable of solving supranational problems. The emphasis on the logic of national sovereignty obstructs the type of solutions that are required (in effect, each government prioritizes internal and short-term interests, while the Amazonian ecosystem declines), highlighting a discrepancy between the scale of a problem, in this case the protection of the Amazon, and the scale of the decision-making power available to address that problem, i.e., the state level of decision-making. 

Therefore, the search for solutions to address the Amazon crisis requires overcoming the limits of fragmentation among states. A first step is to transform ACTO into an organization whose decisions are binding, with its own technical capacity to coordinate, implement, and monitor policies throughout the basin. Second, we join the Amazon Network of Networks (of which Dejusticia is a member) in calling for the creation of a regional fund to respond to climate challenges and to propose solutions together with the indigenous peoples who have historically inhabited the territory. Only then can we stop treating the Amazon as a scattered collection of state territories and begin to see it as a vital space of global responsibility and protection.

By: Sofía Carrerá, researcher of rule of law line.