Promoting Indigenous-Led Conservation
Founded in 2011, Amazon Frontlines is an international organization that supports Indigenous peoples of the Amazon to protect the forest they call home and achieve environmental impacts of global significance. The organization works on the frontlines, hand-in-hand with Indigenous leaders, communities and Nations who collectively steward nearly half of the remaining standing forest across the Amazon Basin.
Amazon Frontlines is focused on ensuring that Indigenous peoples have the resources they need to protect their lands, rivers and way of life. This includes permanently protecting millions of acres of critical rainforest territories from further mining, drilling and deforestation using grassroots organizing, land titling, advocacy and legal defense, cutting-edge technology like GPS mapping and drone and camera trap surveillance and developing next generation community-led initiatives on education, women’s leadership and solar energy.
Partnering for Impact
Amazon Frontlines currently focuses on the Upper Amazon, a sanctuary of immeasurable biodiversity and ecological resilience along the eastern slopes of the Andes range. This headwaters region, which spans hundreds of millions of acres across Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, is currently the best-conserved forest of the entire Amazon.
Amazon Frontlines first worked together alongside diverse Indigenous peoples and international allies to build access to clean water for 78 Indigenous communities affected by oil contamination at the headwaters of the Amazon rainforest. Since then, Amazon Frontlines has brought together Indigenous leaders and communities, human rights lawyers, environmental activists, forestry specialists, anthropologists and filmmakers to develop proven, scalable and sustainable models of locally led conservation. The organization has won some of the most significant climate victories in recent times, including the A’i Cofán and Waorani people’s triumphs in protecting hundreds of thousands of acres of rainforest and establishing legal precedents for Indigenous rights in the Amazon and working within a nationwide coalition that won a referendum in 2023 to indefinitely stop oil drilling in Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park: one of the most biodiverse territories on Earth and the home to two of the world’s last uncontacted Indigenous populations.
