Indigenous Peoples and Demarcated Territories of the Amazon

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Several hundred distinct indigenous peoples live in the Amazon basin, speaking languages from many unrelated families, and their recognised territories cover on the order of a quarter of it - a larger share than the formal conservation protected areas. In Brazil the legal basis is Article 231 of the 1988 Constitution, which recognises indigenous rights to traditionally occupied lands as original and pre-existing rather than granted, with the state's role limited to demarcating them. The empirical result is consistent and repeatedly measured: clearance rates inside recognised indigenous lands run far below rates in comparable land immediately outside them, and analyses of carbon stocks find indigenous territories and protected areas holding roughly half the region's forest carbon while remaining close to carbon-neutral, as the land around them loses carbon. This is not incidental to the forest's composition either. The Amazon that Europeans found in the sixteenth century was already a worked landscape, and its present species mix still carries the signature of that work.