For Erick Alfredo Valerio Benavides, a 43-year-old Indigenous leader of the Iskonawa People from the Peruvian Amazon, the fight to protect the rainforest began with something deeply personal — his language.
Growing up in a small village along the Ucayali River, Valerio Benavides spoke Iskonawa, the language of his ancestors. But over the years, as roads carved deeper into the forest and loggers felled huge tracts of trees, younger generations left to big cities and the voices that carried his culture began to fade.
“When a language dies, we don’t just lose words,” says Valerio Benavides. “We lose knowledge, stories and our connection to the forest.”
It was a situation that was common across the Amazon, the world’s largest remaining rainforest and one of the Earth’s most powerful natural defenses against climate change.
In Peru, home to the second-biggest share of the Amazon after Brazil, a combination of factors including wood extraction, mining, road construction and agricultural expansion is driving, deforestation, reports the international research partnership for sustainable food systems CGIAR. Much of that has happened on Indigenous lands, where poverty often forces community members into land use activities that compound deforestation, the report says.
Financing transformations
But the Amazon’s fate is not yet sealed. Efforts are underway to channel more finance to Indigenous communities like the Iskonawa that conserve, restore and sustainably manage forests. The UN Environment Programme (UNEP), through the UN-REDD Programme, is working with the Peruvian Ministry of Environment to scale up this financing, including through a mechanism known as REDD+, which incentivizes communities and countries to reduce deforestation.
“Increasing finance for forests isn’t about paying communities to do nothing,” says Gabriel Labbate, Head of the Climate Mitigation Unit at UNEP. “This is about supporting them in the challenging but vital task of protecting the forest. Mechanisms like REDD+ bring real results—real emissions reductions and real resilience, biodiversity and community benefits.”
In Peru, an active UN-REDD member country, many Indigenous communities have begun to directly access funding and support through the indigenous-led effort REDD+ Indígena Amazónica (RIA), making them active partners in forest protection.
"[This] is an opportunity to implement mitigation, adaptation and resilience actions in the face of climate change and from the viewpoint of Indigenous peoples, respecting their ancestral knowledge and territorial management," says Fermín Chimatani Tayori, President of the National Association of the Native Communities of the Peruvian Amazon.
Chimatani Tayori’s community co-manages the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve along with 10 Yine and Machiguenga Indigenous settlements. Together, the communities are restoring degraded lands, practicing agroforestry, which incorporates trees on farmland, and growing deforestation-free cacao trees alongside native tree species.
Beyond generating livelihoods, the Indigenous groups managing the reserve have safeguarded over 400,000 hectares of rainforest, roughly 1.5 times the size of Luxembourg. They are preventing about 2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions each year, about the same as taking 40,000 cars off the road.
For Valerio Benavides, this is a game-changer. “When we have control over our own resources, we don’t just protect the forest. We strengthen our culture, our identity and our future,” he says.
Valerio Benavides hopes to pass his language down to a new generation, alongside lessons about conservation, climate change and Indigenous rights.
Levelling up in the Paris Agreement
To take nature-based solutions to the next level, nations must step up with concrete pledges under the Paris Agreement, and ensuring these pledges are implemented says UNEP’s Labbate.
According to a report from UN-REDD, the world’s top 20 tropical countries with the highest rates of deforestation lack sufficient climate commitments in their national climate plans, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). In the next round of NDCs, which are due for submission this year, countries have the chance to correct that and raise their ambition to halt and reduce deforestation by 2030. If not, the consequences could be dire. The Amazon is reaching a tipping point, transforming from a carbon sink into a carbon source, a switch that would accelerate a global climate breakdown, says Labbate.
Observers say the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30), taking place in Belém, Brazil this coming November, could be a turning point, offering world leaders a chance to strengthen forest protection and transform promises into real action.
“At COP30, world leaders must commit to stronger forest action and ensure that climate finance reaches Indigenous guardians of the forest,” says Labbate. “Now is the time to simplify requirements for a complex issue so that ambition, finance and action for forests can be scaled up.”
UNEP is at the forefront of supporting the Paris Agreement goal of keeping global temperature rise well below 2°C, and aiming for 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels. To do this, UNEP has developed the Sectoral Solution, a roadmap to reducing emissions across sectors in line with the Paris Agreement commitments and in pursuit of climate stability. The six sectors identified are: energy; industry; agriculture and food; forests and land use; transport; and buildings and cities.
