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November 2025 marked the 30th convening of the United Nations climate conference (COP). Woodwell Climate has been a pivotal player in the annual COP since our founder, Dr. George Woodwell and early staff members, played an instrumental role in the creation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which enacts the annual conferences. This year was an important milestone for Woodwell due to its focus on tropical forests and nature-based solutions. Woodwell Climate sent 17 staff and scientists to Belem, Brazil, where they spoke at 52 events, and continued the Center’s legacy of advancing science-informed climate policy. Here are 4 takeaways from this year’s conference.

What is COP? Learn more about what goes on at climate’s biggest event of the year in this explainer.

1. COP30 was Brazil’s time to shine

As host country, Brazil used COP 30 to vault themselves into global leadership, to press the importance of international cooperation, and to build bridges between the global north and south. COP30 served as the launchpad for several forest-centered initiatives spearheaded by Brazil, including the Tropical Forests Forever Facility, a new financial solution that would pay tropical countries to keep their forests standing. Woodwell Senior Policy Advisor Frances Seymour and Associate Scientist Dr. Glenn Bush provided input and technical assistance to help launch the TFFF. In addition, Brazil launched a global initiative on wildfire resilience and a global coalition to harmonize carbon markets. Brazil also announced that they will publish two roadmaps in 2026: one to chart the course towards ending halting and reversing deforestation, and another for transitioning away from fossil fuels.

2. NDCs were one of the trickiest issues at COP30 

Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are the promises each party country to the UNFCCC makes every five years, to reduce their emissions. Ahead of COP30, countries were supposed to submit their third round of NDCs to raise their ambition. However, many NDCs were missing by the start of the conference, and those presented would reduce emissions only by 10-12% from 2019 levels by 2035, a far cry from the 60% the IPCC says is needed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The European Union, Latin America, and small island nations attempted to advance this conversation but this was opposed by major emerging economies, who view the NDCs as a commitment to be worked out at the national level.

During several speaking events, Woodwell Senior Research Scientist Dr. Christina Schaedel emphasized the importance of including growing emissions from Arctic permafrost thaw in NDCs and estimates of the global carbon budget. Schaedel’s research has focused on modeling the contributions of permafrost-thaw emissions to sea level rise, temperature increases, and damage costs.

Given strong opposing interests, the issue of NDCs was not resolved by the end of the conference. The UNFCCC instead set up two workstreams to discuss NDC ambition: the Global Implementation Accelerator and the Belem Mission to 1.5. Details about what shape these discussions will take is still forthcoming.

3. Climate finance took center stage

During COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, countries agreed to mobilize $1.3 trillion per year by 2035 for climate adaptation and mitigation. Many hoped COP30 negotiations would identify funding sources to reach that goal: developing countries wanted public finance from industrialized countries, while industrialized countries insisted that finance must also come from major emerging economies and non-governmental sources. Again, the official outcome was to launch work programs to address the issue outside of conference. The programs created will tackle questions of finance obligations and climate-friendly investments.

Woodwell experts provided important contributions to the complex climate finance debate: Seymour played a lead role in the Forest Finance Roadmap for Action highlighted by a coalition of 34 countries, and Vice President of Science, Dr. Wayne Walker introduced a roadmap for carbon and biodiversity credits that takes a community-based and Indigenous-led approach for generating climate finance. 

4. Measurements of progress towards resilience

Countries did reach an agreement on indicators to help measure progress on adaptation and resilience goals in sectors like water, agriculture, health, ecosystems, infrastructure, poverty eradication, and cultural heritage, as well as on resilience efforts, including risk assessments, adaptation planning, and early warning systems. 59 indicators were identified for countries to use in their future progress reports. Woodwell Climate has been supporting adaptation efforts through the Just Access program, which provides cost-free risk assessments to local, state, and national governments around the world.  

Next year’s COP will be hosted jointly by Türkiye and Australia in Antalya, Türkiye, and while the agendas are not fixed, the outcomes of this year’s conference have indicated that NDCs and climate finance will continue to be high priority issues. In addition, a new global stocktake, a required moment under the Paris Agreement to re-evaluate the state of the planet and progress towards goals, is on the horizon.

September 2025— On the shores of Lago Caracaranã, deep in the Brazilian State of Roraima, a group of Indigenous brigadistas gather around printed paper maps. They have come to this lakeside meeting place from their territories across the state and beyond to learn about maps from Dr. Ray Pinheiro Alves, a research analyst at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM). Alves directs each woman to a map of their own territory, completely unlabeled. He hands them drawing supplies, and within moments the brigadistas have oriented perfectly to the map, tracing familiar rivers, home sites, and landmarks from memory.

Roraima is Brazil’s northernmost state. It straddles the equator, and contains both native sweeping grasslands like those around Caracaranã and misty, mountainous stretches of the Amazon rainforest. It is remote, and sometimes disconnected from the rest of the country, yet experiencing the same encroachment from agriculture and illegal mining, and the same increase in destructive fires that often follow in the wake of deforestation. Which is why the Indigenous fire-fighting brigades here are eager to pick up new tools that could help them manage and protect their forests and homes.

Alves believes maps should be one of those tools. He, along with Woodwell Climate research scientist, Dr. Manoela Machado, has been spearheading a series of workshops designed to help Indigenous fire brigades build the skills of cartography and geographic information systems (GIS). Strong GIS knowledge allows fire crews to make use of data to guide decisions about both on- and off-season fire management activities— both of which will become more critical as the climate warms and fire becomes more prevalent and difficult to control.

Brazil’s fiery landscape

It is supposed to be raining in Roraima right now, but the winter has been dry this year. Climate change has been elongating dry seasons in many regions of the country, increasing the time that ecosystems are prone to burning. 

In the Amazon, fires are set intentionally as a part of the deforestation process. Land grabbers use fire to clear the piled vegetation that was cut to make way for cattle ranching, which later will be converted to cropland. With climate shifts, these fires are now more likely to escape into drier and weakened surrounding forests. In Central Brazil, the savana and seasonal wetland ecosystems of the Cerrado and Pantanal have co-evolved with varying levels of frequency and intensity of fire. But prolonged drought and rising temperatures have turned fire seasons into crisis seasons.

Indigenous communities across Brazil have used fire for millennia, working with the ecosystem to promote culturally important species. With climate change extending fire seasons, traditional calendars are also shifting, as the time available for safe burning shrinks. Communities are also facing incursions into their territories from runaway fires ignited on nearby farms.

The world got a taste of the scope of the crisis in 2019 when, during an already record-breaking summer of fire, land grabbers in the Amazon intentionally set so many fires in a single day that the smoke traveled to the City of São Paulo hundreds of miles away. 

“The sky in São Paulo became dark at 3pm. And then the world started paying attention to fires in the Amazon,” says Machado. Protecting Brazil’s forests from fire, especially the carbon-rich Amazon rainforest, became a much higher priority for the international community.

Brazil has an extensive wildland fire fighting system, composed of both official and voluntary brigades, supported by various government agencies to operate across private lands, protected public lands, and Indigenous territories. Amidst the increased urgency to quell fires, Machado was interested in understanding what brigades at different jurisdiction levels might need to be more effective during crisis months. She herself has extensive expertise in geospatial software and analysis and wondered whether organizations like Woodwell Climate and IPAM could help by providing data on terrain, weather patterns, vegetation type, and other field-relevant information.

So Machado and Senior Scientist Dr. Marcia Macedo, conducted a needs assessment of the firefighting system to identify what analyses might be most useful.

“The answer was a little bit different, depending on who we were talking to,” says Macedo. “But when we spoke to the Indigenous fire brigades, one of the things that came out right away was not just a desire for spatial data, but for training in spatial analysis. They wanted to be able to work with the data the same way we did.”

Two ways of knowing the land

For the Indigenous communities of Brazil, maps aren’t needed for navigating their territory the way Google Maps might be for someone walking in unfamiliar lands.

“The Indigenous peoples of Brazil have a great understanding of their territory,” says Alves. “We show them an image and they recognize some river or some landmark. They can see it immediately in the satellite view.”

Instead, geospatial data offers another way of communicating their innate knowledge of the land. For the Indigenous fire brigades Machado and Macedo spoke with, the ability to use the same GIS tools that scientists use, and make maps the way a government agency like Brazil’s Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) might, is invaluable to advocating for themselves in non-Indigenous spaces. 

“To be able to make their own maps can strengthen their autonomy to make decisions, and [aid in] dialogs with people about public policies,” says Alves.

Machado worked with Alves to develop the curriculum for a series of workshops that would help teach the foundations of GIS to fire brigade members from Indigenous territories across Brazil. The first was held in Brasília in 2022, and three more have followed since, the class in Roraima most recently.

Each workshop begins with the basics—latitude and longitude, hemispheres, projections. Alves is a natural teacher, and makes use of props, metaphors, and activities like drawing on the printed maps to make the concepts feel more tangible.

On later days of the workshop, as participants get familiar with QGIS, a free map-making software, Alves sometimes adapts the suggested curriculum to the needs of the communities in attendance. 

“For example, in one class we were presenting topographic maps, and they said ‘this is really, really, useful for us,’” says Alves. “So we changed that part of the course to solve for the question they were dealing with.”

By the end of the course, participants have successfully created maps relevant to their own territories. Seeing their own homes represented in map form, Machado says, connects them more strongly to the material.

“You could see the pride on their face,” Machado says. “They recognize every element of that map because they built it. They made each decision of what to show on the map.”

The women’s brigade

Ana Shelley Xerente of the Xerente people had watched her husband work on their territory’s official fire brigade for 13 years before she decided she’d like to try her hand at it as well. Over the years raising her two children, she observed changes occurring in the native Cerrado ecosystem of the Xerente territory—hotter temperatures, drying streams, more fires. 

“Nowadays, right after the rain, it’s basically dry,” says Ana Shelley. “All due to climate change.”

She felt a strong duty to protect the environment, and told her husband she’d like to work at Prevfogo, the firefighting arm of Brazil’s Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA), like him.

“He kept teasing me. ‘There’s no way you could handle that,’” Ana Shelley says. “But I kept talking about it and he came up with the idea of creating a volunteer brigade.”

Volunteer brigades support official brigades, including with that critical non-crisis season prevention work. In 2021, responding to interest from Ana Shelley and others in the territory, Prevfogo and the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) provided support to start an all-woman volunteer brigade— the first in Brazil. Ana Shelley drove her team of 29 women from village to village, speaking to elders, educating children, re-planting vegetation around headwater streams, and discussing how climate change has affected their traditional calendar for cultural burning.

“We have our own calendar, made by our elders. It marks the rainy season and the dry season, when burning isn’t allowed. So we went through the whole territory, talking to people about what fire brings, the impact it has on humans and animals, and there was a significant reduction [in fires],” Ana Shelley says.

Ana Shelley began to stand out as a leader among the volunteers. In 2024, when her husband left his role as president of the official territory brigade to pursue work with FUNAI, she was asked to fill in for the remainder of his term. At the start of 2025, she was named president for her own four-year term, and has eagerly assumed the responsibility of organizing the activities of 74 Indigenous firefighters, both men and women.

“Everything is new to me, being a brigade chief. And since in our community it’s mostly men who call the shots, it causes an impact, because now the chief is a woman, so it’s all new to them, too,” Ana Shelley says. “I learn a lot from them, and I also share with them what I know. I’m sure it’s going to be challenging, but I also know it’s going to bring a lot of good results.”

Classroom representation

The second GIS workshop was hosted in Ana Shelley’s own territory in Tocantins, but only her husband participated in the course. In fact, midway through the workshop, Machado looked around and wondered why, in a territory with an established brigade of motivated female fire fighters, she was the only woman in the classroom. 

Despite not being in operation for as long as the men’s brigades, the brigadistas were eager to perform at the same level. Perhaps, Machado wondered, the workshops could be an opportunity to level the playing field.

She suggested hosting a women’s-only brigade training to encourage their participation, giving women a chance to learn alongside others with similar experiences. The first one took place in Maranhão in June, followed by the one in Roraima.

Macedo says this kind of peer representation is critical to the success of capacity sharing efforts like this one. 

“Peer-to-peer teaching and knowledge sharing among people who are living the same reality is almost always more effective than us scientists standing at the front [of a class],” Macedo says.

The brigadistas of Roraima are the clear result of women’s representation on fire brigades, which started in Tocantins with Ana Shelley and has now unfurled across the country. Roraima was the first Brazilian state to formalize all-female fire brigades with the Brigada Pataxibas— a multi-territory collective of female firefighters. During the closing ceremony for the workshop in Roraima a Tuxaua, or elderly community member honored for their wisdom, named Azila stood to point out the bravery of the women assembled, who had accomplished things she never had the opportunity to do in her youth.

Brigade participation has also begun to open doors for women even beyond their territories. 

“Some have become teachers, others are in college. It has broadened their horizons. We’ve inspired many women across Brazil,” says Ana Shelley.

According to Machado, the GIS training offers all participants, men and women, the opportunity to tell their own stories on their own terms.

“Maps tell stories,” says Machado. “So the importance of all community members being able to build their own maps is that it allows them to control the narrative. They control how their story is told, instead of waiting for someone else to build a map and tell the story for them.”

The future of fire management

For now, the workshops are planned and hosted on an ad hoc basis, as funding allows. But Macedo sees a pressing need to scale up. The more brigades participate, the more excitement grows for the material.

“If we offered one of these a month for a while, we still wouldn’t be able to meet the demand for them,” says Macedo.

At some point, Macedo says, the project will have to shift to a “training the trainers” strategy. The team envisions a model where the most engaged workshop participants are taught the skills needed not just to make maps but to teach others, expanding this knowledge further and faster than Alves, Machado, and Macedo could on their own. Technology access is another limiter. Some Indigenous communities have access to laptops at central headquarters but it is not common for each community to have its own laptop and almost no individual brigade members do. More laptops would allow workshop participants to continue practicing their skills on their own time.

Policies in Brazil have also begun to shift to open additional opportunities. In 2024, the country passed a new Integrated Fire Management law that will require greater coordination among different brigade jurisdictions for pre-season and mid-season firefighting activities. The law places a specific emphasis on incorporating traditional knowledge. Macedo says she thinks the GIS workshops could contribute to this greater movement and help position Indigenous communities as central to the country’s fire management policies.

When Ana Shelley reflects on how much her brigades have already been able to accomplish, and the possibilities on the horizon, she is hopeful.

“I see a much better future.”

Setembro de 2025 — Nas margens do Lago Caracaranã, no interior do estado brasileiro de Roraima, um grupo de brigadistas indígenas se reúne em torno de mapas impressos em papel. Elas vieram a este ponto de encontro à beira do lago desde seus territórios em todo o estado, e até de outros estados, para aprender sobre mapas com o Dr. Ray Pinheiro Alves, analista de pesquisa do Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (IPAM). Alves direciona cada brigadista para um mapa de seu território, completamente sem rótulos. Ele distribui materiais de desenho e, em poucos instantes, as brigadistas já estão perfeitamente orientadas no mapa, traçando de memória rios conhecidos, locais de moradia e pontos de referência.

Roraima é o estado mais ao norte do Brasil. Ele atravessa o Equador e abriga desde vastos campos como os que cercam o lago Caracaranã até trechos montanhosos e enevoados de floresta Amazônica. É uma região remota e, por vezes, desconectada do restante do país, mas que sofre com as mesmas pressões da expansão da agricultura e do garimpo ilegal, além do mesmo aumento de fogos destrutivos que frequentemente acompanham o processo de desmatamento. É por isso que as brigadas indígenas aqui estão ansiosas para adotar novas ferramentas que possam ajudá-las a manejar e proteger suas florestas e lares.

Alves acredita que os mapas devem ser uma dessas ferramentas. Ele, juntamente com a pesquisadora do Woodwell Climate, Dra. Manoela Machado, tem liderado uma série de workshops desenvolvidos para ajudar brigadistas indígenas a desenvolverem habilidades em cartografia e sistemas de informações geográficas (SIG). O domínio das ferramentas de SIG permite que brigadistas façam uso de dados para orientar decisões sobre o manejo de fogo, tanto durante quanto fora da temporada de queimadas — atividades que se tornarão cada vez mais essenciais à medida que o clima esquenta e os incêndios se tornam mais prevalentes e difíceis de controlar.

A paisagem ardente do Brasil

Deveria estar chovendo em Roraima agora, mas o inverno tem sido seco este ano. As mudanças climáticas têm prolongado as estações secas em muitas regiões do país, aumentando o período em que os ecossistemas ficam propensos ao fogo.

Na Amazônia, o fogo é provocado intencionalmente como parte do processo de desmatamento. Grileiros usam o fogo para limpar a vegetação acumulada após a derrubada, abrindo espaço para as pastagens, que mais tarde serão convertidas em lavouras. Com as mudanças climáticas, esse fogo tem mais chance de escapar para florestas mais secas e enfraquecidas ao redor. Mais ao centro do Brasil, os ecossistemas de savana e áreas úmidas sazonais do Cerrado e do Pantanal coevoluíram com níveis variados de frequência e intensidade de fogo. Mas a seca prolongada e o aumento das temperaturas transformaram as temporadas de fogo em temporadas de crise.

Comunidades indígenas em todo o Brasil usam o fogo há milênios, trabalhando com o ecossistema para promover espécies culturalmente importantes. Com as mudanças climáticas prolongando as temporadas de fogo, os calendários tradicionais também estão mudando, já que o período disponível para queimadas seguras diminui. As comunidades também estão enfrentando invasões em seus territórios por incêndios descontrolados iniciados em fazendas vizinhas.

O mundo teve um vislumbre da dimensão da crise em 2019, quando, durante um verão já recordista em incêndios, grileiros na Amazônia atearam tantos focos em um único dia que a fumaça percorreu centenas de quilômetros e chegou a encobrir a cidade de São Paulo.

“O céu em São Paulo escureceu às 15h. E então o mundo começou a prestar atenção ao fogo na Amazônia”, diz Machado. Proteger as florestas do Brasil dos incêndios, especialmente Amazônia, rica em carbono, tornou-se uma prioridade muito maior para a comunidade internacional.

O Brasil tem um amplo sistema de combate a incêndios florestais, composto por brigadas oficiais e voluntárias, apoiadas por vários órgãos governamentais para operar em terras privadas, áreas públicas protegidas e Territórios Indígenas. Em meio à crescente urgência de conter incêndios, Machado estava interessada em entender o que brigadas de diferentes níveis de jurisdição poderiam precisar para serem mais eficazes durante os meses de crise. Ela própria tem ampla experiência em análise geoespacial e se perguntou se organizações como Woodwell Climate e IPAM poderiam ajudar fornecendo dados sobre terreno, padrões climáticos, tipo de vegetação e outras informações relevantes para o campo.

Então, Machado e a cientista sênior Dra. Marcia Macedo conduziram uma avaliação das necessidades do sistema de combate a incêndios para identificar quais análises poderiam ser mais úteis.

“A resposta variava um pouco, dependendo de com quem estávamos falando”, diz Macedo. “Mas quando falamos com os brigadistas indígenas, uma das coisas que surgiu de imediato não foi apenas um desejo por dados espaciais, mas por treinamento em análise espacial. Eles queriam poder trabalhar com os dados da mesma forma que nós.”

Duas maneiras de conhecer a terra

Para as comunidades indígenas do Brasil, os mapas não são necessários para navegar em seus territórios da mesma forma que o Google Maps pode ser para alguém caminhando em terras desconhecidas.

“Os povos indígenas do Brasil têm um grande conhecimento dos seus territórios”, diz Alves. “Mostramos uma imagem e eles reconhecem algum rio ou algum marco. Eles veem isso imediatamente na visão de satélite.”

Em vez disso, os dados geoespaciais oferecem outra maneira de comunicar esse conhecimento inato da terra. Para  as brigadas indígenas com quem Machado e Macedo conversaram, a capacidade de usar as mesmas ferramentas de SIG que os cientistas usam, e de fazer mapas da mesma forma que um órgão governamental, como o Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renováveis (IBAMA) faria, é inestimável para que possam se representar e reivindicar seus interesses em espaços não indígenas.

“Poder fazer os próprios mapas pode fortalecer a autonomia para tomar decisões e [ajudar] nos diálogos sobre políticas públicas”, diz Alves.

Machado trabalhou com Alves para desenvolver o conteúdo de uma série de workshops que ajudariam a ensinar os fundamentos de SIG a brigadistas de Territórios Indígenas em todo o Brasil. O primeiro foi realizado em Brasília em 2022, e outros três se seguiram desde então, sendo a turma de Roraima a mais recente.

Cada workshop começa pelo básico: latitude e longitude, hemisférios, projeções. Alves é um professor nato e faz uso de adereços, metáforas e atividades como desenhar em mapas impressos para tornar os conceitos mais tangíveis.

Nos dias seguintes, à medida que os participantes se familiarizam com o QGIS, um software gratuito de elaboração de mapas, Alves adapta as aulas às necessidades das comunidades presentes.

“Por exemplo, em uma aula estávamos apresentando mapas topográficos, e eles disseram ‘isso é muito, muito útil para nós’”, diz Alves. “Então mudamos o curso para resolver a questão com a qual eles estavam lidando.”

Ao final do curso, os participantes haviam criado mapas relevantes para seus territórios. Ver suas próprias casas representadas em forma de mapa, diz Machado, os conecta mais profundamente ao material.

“Dava para ver o orgulho no rosto delas”, diz Machado. “Elas reconhecem cada elemento daquele mapa porque foram elas que construíram. Elas tomaram cada decisão sobre o que mostrar no mapa.”

A brigada feminina

Ana Shelley Xerente, do povo Xerente, viu seu marido trabalhar na brigada oficial de seu território por 13 anos antes de decidir que também gostaria de experimentar. Ao longo dos anos criando seus dois filhos, ela observou mudanças ocorrendo no ecossistema nativo do Cerrado do território Xerente: temperaturas mais altas, córregos secando, mais incêndios.

“Hoje em dia, logo depois da chuva, já está praticamente seco”, diz Ana Shelley. “Tudo por causa das mudanças climáticas.”

Ela sentiu um forte dever de proteger o meio ambiente e disse ao marido que gostaria de trabalhar no Prevfogo, o braço de combate a incêndios do IBAMA, como ele.

“Ele vivia me provocando. “Não tem como você aguentar isso”, diz Ana Shelley. “Mas eu continuei falando sobre isso e ele teve a ideia de criar uma brigada  voluntária.”

As brigadas voluntárias apoiam as brigadas oficiais, inclusive no trabalho crítico de prevenção realizado fora do período de crise. Em 2021, atendendo ao interesse de Ana Shelley e de outras pessoas do território, o PREVFOGO e a FUNAI ofereceram apoio para criar uma brigada voluntária composta exclusivamente por mulheres,— a primeira no Brasil. Ana Shelley levava sua equipe de 29 mulheres de aldeia em aldeia, conversando com anciões, educando crianças, reflorestando margens de nascentes e discutindo como as mudanças climáticas têm afetado o calendário tradicional de queimadas culturais.

“Temos nosso próprio calendário, feito pelos nossos anciões. Ele marca a estação chuvosa e a estação seca, quando a queimada não é permitida. Então, percorremos todo o território, conversando com as pessoas sobre o que o fogo traz, o impacto que ele tem sobre humanos e animais, e houve uma redução significativa [nos incêndios]”, diz Ana Shelley.

Ana Shelley começou a se destacar como líder entre as voluntárias. Em 2024, quando seu marido deixou o cargo de presidente da brigada oficial Xerente para trabalhar na FUNAI, ela foi convidada a substituí-lo pelo restante do mandato dele. No início de 2025, ela foi nomeada presidente para seu próprio mandato de quatro anos e assumiu com entusiasmo a responsabilidade de organizar as atividades de 74 brigadistas indígenas, homens e mulheres.

“Tudo é novo para mim, ser chefe de brigada. E como na nossa comunidade são, na maioria, os homens que tomam as decisões, isso causa um impacto, porque agora a chefe é uma mulher, então é tudo novo para eles também”, diz Ana Shelley. “Eu aprendo muito com eles e compartilho com eles o que eu sei. Tenho certeza de que vai ser desafiador, mas também sei que vai trazer muitos bons resultados.”

Representação em sala de aula

O segundo workshop de SIG foi realizado no território de Ana Shelley, no Tocantins, mas apenas seu marido participou do curso. De fato, em certo momento do workshop, Machado olhou ao redor e se perguntou por que, em um território com uma brigada de mulheres motivadas, ela era a única mulher na sala de aula.

Apesar de não estarem em operação há tanto tempo quanto as brigadas masculinas, as brigadistas estavam ansiosas para atuar no mesmo nível. Talvez, pensou Machado, os workshops pudessem ser uma oportunidade para nivelar o campo de atuação.

Ela sugeriu organizar um treinamento exclusivo para mulheres, incentivando sua a participação e dando às elas a oportunidade de aprender ao lado de outras mulheres com experiências semelhantes. A primeira ocorreu no Maranhão, em junho, seguida pela de Roraima.

Macedo afirma que esse tipo de representatividade entre pares é essencial para o sucesso de iniciativas de compartilhamento de capacidade como este.

“O ensino entre pares e a troca de conhecimento entre pessoas que vivem a mesma realidade são quase sempre mais eficazes do que nós, cientistas, em pé na frente [de uma turma]”, diz Macedo.

As brigadistas de Roraima são o resultado claro da representatividade feminina em brigadas, que começou no Tocantins com Ana Shelley e agora se espalhou pelo país. Roraima foi o primeiro estado brasileiro a formalizar brigadas exclusivamente femininas com a Brigada Pataxibas — um coletivo multiterritorial de mulheres combatentes. Durante a cerimônia de encerramento da oficina em Roraima, uma Tuxaua, ou anciã da comunidade reconhecida por sua sabedoria, chamada Azila, destacou a coragem das mulheres ali reunidas, que haviam alcançado coisas que ela mesma nunca tivera a oportunidade de fazer em sua juventude.

A participação nas brigadas também começou a abrir portas para as mulheres para além de seus territórios.

“Algumas se tornaram professoras, outras estão na faculdade. Ampliou seus horizontes delas. “Inspiramos muitas mulheres em todo o Brasil”, diz Ana Shelley.

Segundo Machado, o treinamento em SIG oferece a todos os participantes, homens e mulheres, a oportunidade de contar suas próprias histórias em seus próprios termos.

“Mapas contam histórias”, diz Machado. “Portanto, a importância de todos os membros da comunidade poderem construir seus próprios mapas é que isso lhes permite controlar a narrativa. Eles controlam como sua história é contada, em vez de esperar que alguém faça um mapa e conte a história por eles.”

O futuro da gestão de incêndios

Por enquanto, os workshops são planejados e realizados de forma ad hoc, conforme o financiamento permite. Mas Macedo vê uma necessidade urgente de expansão. Quanto mais brigadas participam, mais cresce o entusiasmo pelo material.

“Se oferecêssemos um desses por mês durante um tempo, ainda não conseguiríamos atender à demanda”, diz Macedo.

Em algum momento, diz Macedo, o projeto terá que mudar para uma estratégia de “formar formadores”. A equipe imagina um modelo em que os participantes mais engajados do workshop sejam capacitados não apenas para fazer mapas, mas também para ensinar outras pessoas, expandindo esse conhecimento de forma mais ampla e rápida do que Alves, Machado e Macedo conseguiriam sozinhos. O acesso à tecnologia é outro limitador. Algumas comunidades indígenas têm computadores em sedes centrais, mas não é comum cada comunidade possuir o seu, e quase nenhum brigadista tem computador próprio. Mais laptops permitiriam que os participantes dos workshops continuassem praticando suas habilidades de forma autônoma.

As políticas no Brasil também começaram a mudar para abrir novas oportunidades. Em 2024, o país aprovou uma nova lei de Manejo Integrado do Fogo que exigirá maior coordenação entre diferentes jurisdições de brigadas para atividades de prevenção e combate, tanto no início quanto no meio da temporada de fogo. A lei dá ênfase à incorporação do conhecimento tradicional. Macedo diz que acredita que os workshops de SIG podem contribuir para esse movimento maior e ajudar a posicionar as comunidades indígenas como centrais nas políticas nacionais de manejo do fogo.

Quando Ana Shelley reflete sobre o quanto suas brigadas já conseguiram realizar e as possibilidades no horizonte, ela se mostra otimista.

“Eu vejo um futuro muito melhor.”

From the Amazon to the Congo Basin, the largest remainder of tropical forest lies in Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo – taking up nearly 4 million square miles of land. As epicenters of biodiversity and carbon storage, these forests serve as the stabilizers of our climate. Yet many tropical forests around the world are disappearing as climate change and human activity drive deforestation every year. 

Despite covering only 6% of the planet, tropical forests play a critical role in climate control. They prevent atmospheric warming by storing carbon, dispersing heat, releasing cooling water into the air, and helping to create clouds. They also help regulate air quality, soil health, and the water cycle. Keeping them standing is one of our best natural climate solutions. 

At the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), over 100 world leaders pledged to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030, but deforestation has continued year over year. Under our current economic system, forests are often more valuable cut and cleared than left standing. 

But this year, a new solution has appeared on the horizon: a fund to incentivize tropical forest conservation.

The tropical deforestation crisis

In 2024, the tropics lost 6.7 million hectares of primary forest – old forest that has been relatively undisturbed by humans – at a rate of 18 soccer fields per minute. It was a record-breaking year for primary forest loss and the fastest rate of primary forest deforestation on record, with much of the increase driven by wildfire. 

Bolivia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo saw some of the highest levels of primary forest loss on record. But Brazil, the world’s largest tropical forest nation and home to over half of the Amazon rainforest, took the biggest hit. Over 40% of all tropical primary forest loss in 2024 occurred in Brazil. 

The main forces behind forest loss worldwide are all human activities: agricultural expansion, mining, logging, and infrastructure development. Dr. Ludmila Rattis, Assistant Scientist and General Coordinator of Woodwell’s Tanguro Field Station, works on the Brazilian agricultural frontier to understand the impacts of agricultural intensification. 

“Today, the number one driver of deforestation in the Amazon and Cerrado is land grabbing,” Rattis says. 

Land grabbing refers to the control and clearing of large plots of land by a person or entity without clear rights to do so. In Brazil, land grabbing has been common since colonial times, when legislation restricted access to land. Today, nearly 50 million hectares of public forest in the Brazilian Amazon remains “undesignated” – meaning the land has not been formally designated by the government for a specific purpose – which leaves it highly vulnerable to grabbing. 

Brazil is a major producer of agricultural commodities including beef, soybeans, and coffee. Because the country has a large amount of undesignated land with unclear regulations, land grabbing for agricultural production is profitable – and cleared forests are more financially valuable than standing ones. Brazilian law also allows the legal deforestation of some trees on private property, as long as 80% of forests on the property remain standing. 

In late 2023, the Brazilian government proposed the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) as a new financial solution that would pay tropical countries to keep their forests standing. Designed to generate and distribute $4 billion each year, it would complement other sources of finance by focusing incentives on forest conservation.

How does the TFFF work?

The TFFF is a global investment fund that proposes to use finance and investment strategies to generate annual payments to tropical forest countries that conserve and restore their forests. First introduced at COP28, the fund would provide tropical forest nations with large-scale, predictable payments based on how much forest cover they maintain.

The fund will raise money from both the public and private sectors, starting with $125 billion – $25 billion from government sponsors in long-term loans and guarantees and $100 billion from long-term, low-interest bond sales to private sector investors. The money raised will be invested into bonds with a high rate of return to generate revenue. Part of the revenue will be used to pay down interest on loans from bond-holders and government sponsors, with the remaining earnings being allocated to fund annual payments to tropical forest nations.

Frances Seymour, Senior Policy Advisor at Woodwell, is working on forest finance priorities leading up to COP30 this year. 

“The innovative feature is the use of public capital to reduce the risk of non-repayment to private investors,” Seymour says. 

The return generated by the fund would be paid out to eligible tropical forest countries at an initial rate of $4 per hectare of forest. It would be distributed to eligible governments with a deduction applied for every hectare deforested or degraded.

In order to be eligible for the fund, a country must be a developing nation with tropical or subtropical broadleaf moist forests – forests characterized by year-round warmth, high levels of precipitation, and trees with broad, flat leaves. Additionally, the deforestation rate during the year the country adheres to the TFFF must be lower than the previous year. 

To track deforestation rates, participating nations would need to use remote sensing technologies such as satellite imagery. For example, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) monitors tree cover loss using satellite-based systems. Countries that do not have the ability to monitor their own forests would be allowed to use approved third-party methods and data.

How many trees make a forest?

Areas eligible for forest payments must also have more than 20% canopy cover, which refers to the percentage of the upper layer of trees in a forest that obscures light passing through. But some people argue that the proposed threshold isn’t high enough. 

Scientists at Woodwell Climate, including Associate Scientist Glenn Bush and Research Assistant Patrick Fedor, are pushing for higher canopy cover thresholds for the fund.

“The problem is that most of us who work in tropical forests and know them well would say that a patch of land which only has 20% of forest cover isn’t a forest anymore – it’s a field,” Bush says.

A landscape with a few large trees scattered around may have canopies that register at 20% cover despite no longer functioning as a forest. Scientists recommend increasing the canopy cover threshold to 60% or even 80% to focus on high-value intact tropical forest areas and prevent cleared areas from qualifying for TFFF benefits. 

In a memo to TFFF Secretariat Andre Aquino, Bush and Fedor assessed management costs and social benefits of conserving tropical forests in Brazil and the DRC. They found that with raised canopy thresholds and adjusted payments, the TFFF could help protect more biodiverse and climate resilient forests without increasing the fund’s total budget. The counter argument, however, is that any forests below the increased threshold may face a higher risk of being permanently converted to another use rather than restored if not included in the scheme. 

“The biggest thing is to increase canopy cover because we want resilient forests,” Fedor says. “We’re trying to keep forests fully intact.” 

COP30 and the future of tropical forests

While the specifics of the fund aren’t fully agreed upon, the general consensus is that the global effort would make a significant positive change for tropical forest nations. By providing a source of predictable budget support for forest conservation and management, tropical forest nations could bring environmental goals to the forefront of government policy and action.

“This is a really long-term commitment to what could be potentially transformational change,” Bush says. 

If successful, the model has the potential to apply to other efforts beyond forest conservation. The TFFF model, Seymour says, could be replicated to finance efforts such as girls’ education or eradicating malaria, two areas that are facing pressures from recent reductions in development aid from wealthy countries. 

The proposed TFFF model also puts an emphasis on Indigenous communities and their contribution to forest conservation by requiring a minimum of 20% of annual payments to each country – a global amount totalling at least $800 million annually – to be allocated to Indigenous and local forest communities. 

“The focus on Indigenous Peoples and reinforcing land rights is really critical,” Bush says. “That’s the first time a fund of this sort has actually involved Indigenous Peoples groups in its design in such an early stage.” 

Research has shown that Indigenous communities are the key to protecting tropical forests. Managing over half of the world’s remaining intact forests, Indigenous tropical forest communities experience more carbon capture, less carbon loss, and less tree cover loss than other lands. When Indigenous land rights are enforced, forests thrive.

“It’s an innovative policy that’s hopefully going to promote good change and good environmental outcomes,” Fedor says. “It changes the economics of a forest’s value.”

During New York Climate Week in September, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced that Brazil itself would invest $1 billion in sponsor capital, challenging other governments to do their part as well. The Brazilian government plans to formally launch TFFF at COP30 in Belém, Brazil in November. With the world’s biggest climate event hosted in the world’s biggest tropical forest nation, tropical forests will feature heavily on the international agenda. Roughly 45,000 policymakers, government negotiators, scientists, activists, and Indigenous leaders will be descending on the city at the mouth of the Amazon, placing a major spotlight on one of the very regions the TFFF is designed to protect.

“If there were ever a moment when a big idea like this could get the political and financial support that it needs to get off the ground,” Seymour says, “this is it.”

Last month in Dakar, Senegal, Woodwell Climate Associate Scientist Glenn Bush and Forests & Climate Change Coordinator Joseph Zambo facilitated a high-level workshop with the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Director of Climate Change, Aimé Mbuyi, lead scientist on the country’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) reporting process, Prof. Onesphore Mutshaili, and project consultant Melaine Kermarc. The goal of the workshop was to begin generating a clear set of priorities for the next 5 years for stepping up the ambition of the country’s NDCs, and to discuss strategies for monitoring and reporting on emissions.

Under the Paris Agreement, each country is required to submit to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change a detailed description of their emissions reduction commitments and then regular reports on progress. Currently, DRC has pledged to reduce emissions by 21% by 2030, focusing on reform in their energy, agriculture, forestry, and other land use sectors. While NDCs are intended to represent a country’s highest possible ambition, DRC is looking to step up further. Officials are at work developing a plan to reach net-zero emissions, which would place the country among the leaders of climate policy in Africa.

In order to do this, DRC needs a reliable framework for measuring and monitoring emissions, so that progress can be accurately reported on. At the workshop, Bush, Mbuyi, Zambo, Kermarc  and Mutshaili discussed ways to strengthen the NDC reporting process. Among the top needs identified was stronger institutional scientific capacity, increased coordination and data sharing, and more funding and awareness of the process at local and provincial levels.

“High quality data is essential to building a high integrity NDC,” says Bush. “Improving the scope and quality of data available to monitor carbon will not only help the country meet the highest tier of reporting standards, but also access performance-based payment mechanisms to help finance the transition to a low emissions economy.” 

Through their conversations about challenges and opportunities, the group identified three areas for intervention that will help the country navigate towards a stronger emissions reduction plan. These recommendations were outlined in a report on the workshop proceedings.

1. Improved governance and policy management: Establishing a National Climate Change Council to better integrate climate policy into national development plans.
2. Science-backed carbon accounting and budgeting: Developing credible data standards for measuring emissions and ecosystem services to support transparent and effective reporting on climate performance. 
3. Cross-sectoral integration: Promoting emissions reductions across all sectors through collaborative partnerships, particularly in the field of climate-smart agriculture and carbon payment mechanisms. 

Mr Aimé Mbuyi, Head of the Climate Change Division (CCD) at the DRC’s Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development, declared that “these recommendations reflect an important set of practical steps to move from aspiration to operational reality in order to increase the financing and impact to conserve our forests and stimulate sustainable development in the DRC”.

Woodwell Climate Research Center has been a long time partner of the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development. The Center is assisting the ministry in laying the technical foundations to support the NDC improvement process and helping build in-country scientific capacity to make a net-zero emissions plan a reality. This and other partnerships will be essential in transitioning the DRC to a low-carbon economy.

“We appreciated the long-standing trust that has developed over years of formal and informal collaboration on climate policy,” said Mbuyi. “The scientific partnership with Woodwell is invaluable to us at CCD, providing actionable information that has proven essential to advancing the climate mitigation and adaptation agenda.”

A new study, just published in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment, finds that severe droughts in the Amazon basin over the last two decades have led to longer periods of low water levels and triggered profound impacts on the local population. 

The severe droughts in 2005, 2010, and 2015-2016, in particular, not only drastically reduced water levels in a substantial part of the world’s largest river system, but also resulted in low water level periods exceeding 100 days, a month longer than expected. 

These droughts have major impacts on rural, remote Amazonian communities who heavily rely on inland water transport to access goods and services, reach urban centers, and maintain their livelihoods. The study concludes that during severe droughts, when such water transport is not available, nearly 50% of non-Indigenous localities and 54% of Indigenous villages in the Brazilian part of the Amazon basin are prone to isolation. These droughts also expose Amazonian communities to scarcity of goods, restricted access to healthcare and education, limited access to fishing and hunting sites, and other major impacts. 

“This is the new reality of the Amazon,” said Dr. Letícia Santos de Lima, researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) and lead author of the study. “Scientists have been warning for years that the Amazon basin is facing a substantial increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme events due to climate change, on top of severe changes in its hydrological system due to deforestation and forest degradation. These past droughts as well as the most recent one, 2023-2024, are showing that the impacts on the ecosystems extend severely to the Amazon population.”

“The Amazon faces increasingly severe droughts due to global warming, with very real consequences for the communities that live there,” added Dr. Marcia Macedo, Woodwell Climate Research Center scientist and study co-author. “To better prepare for these extreme climate events, we need climate solutions that prioritize water resources alongside efforts to curb carbon emissions. This will be key for sustaining resilient ecosystems and communities in the Amazon and around the world.”

The paper states that “actions to cope with recent droughts in the Amazon have been reactive rather than proactive and grounded in preparedness and adaptation principles,” and calls for Amazon countries to “develop long-term strategies for mitigation, adaptation, and disaster response.” The authors also stress that any solutions to isolation must not also worsen the problem. For example, roads would not be an effective solution as they are a well-known driver of deforestation, which leads to changes in rainfall, contributes to a higher volume of sediments in rivers, and would impair navigability even further.

Using an interdisciplinary approach, researchers combined spatial analysis, methods from hydrology, and news media content analysis to deliver the first spatiotemporal assessment of cross-sectoral impacts of droughts in the Amazon basin.

O céu se abre no momento em que nosso caminhão deixa o último trecho de estrada pavimentada. A Diretora do Programa de Água, Dra. Marcia Macedo, aperta os olhos para manter o foco no que consegue ver entre uma limpeza e outra do para-brisa. Em poucos minutos, nosso caminho se transformou de uma estrada de terra em um leito de rio de lama laranja brilhante, sulcado pela passagem de caminhões pesados que transportam soja das fazendas vizinhas.

Macedo desvia para evitar solavancos e depressões, mas logo há mais deles do que estrada plana. Nós nos preparamos para as poças, olhando pelas janelas salpicadas de spray laranja.

É uma manhã de segunda-feira, na estação chuvosa, nos arredores da Amazônia, e estamos indo para o trabalho.

A Estação de Campo de Tanguro fica a cerca de uma hora de carro de Canarana, a cidade mais próxima, localizada em uma região do Brasil às vezes chamada de arco do desmatamento. Há várias décadas, a agricultura começou a surgir na região sul da floresta amazônica, criando áreas retangulares de terras agrícolas na floresta primária. Na maior parte do trajeto, somos ladeados apenas por megacampos de soja ou pastos de gado.

Macedo, que realiza pesquisas na Tanguro desde 2007, lembra-se de uma época em que a viagem poderia ter sido marcada pela travessia do limiar das savanas florestais do Cerrado – Brasil – para a Amazônia. Agora, o desmatamento próximo à estrada obscureceu essa transição natural. Eventualmente, no entanto, tufos verdes exuberantes emergem da chuva e percebemos que estamos quase lá.

Desde a sua fundação em 2004, a Tanguro tem oferecido a pesquisadores de todo o mundo a oportunidade de investigar grandes questões sobre como as mudanças climáticas e o desmatamento estão afetando a Amazônia. Macedo e sua equipe vieram para estudar os córregos e reservatórios da Tanguro.

Paramos do lado de fora da estação de pesquisa, tirando as malas, embrulhadas em sacos plásticos de lixo, da caçamba da caminhonete. A assistente de pesquisa, Zoe Dietrich, segura vários componentes eletrônicos vitais no peito, levando-os para uma varanda coberta para protegê-los da chuva. A pós-doutoranda Dra. Aibra Atwood começa a retirar tubos de núcleo de sedimentos de uma pilha de equipamentos. As nuvens se dissipam e o dia de trabalho na Tanguro começa.

A Fundação

A decisão de se estabelecer na fazenda Tanguro causou polêmica na época.“Quase nos separou”, lembra o fundador da Tanguro, Dr. Daniel Nepstad. “Tivemos uma discussão que durou dois dias.”

Quatorze anos antes, Nepstad havia estabelecido o programa amazônico no Woodwell Climate (então Woods Hole Research Center) no estado do Pará, estudando a resiliência das florestas amazônicas durante as longas estações secas. Esse trabalho deu origem a um novo instituto de pesquisa com sede no Brasil – em 1995, Nepstad cofundou o Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (IPAM) em Belém para buscar ciência relevante para políticas que pudessem informar o desenvolvimento sustentável na Amazônia. A Woodwell Climate e o IPAM começaram a realizar experimentos de simulação de secas e descobriram que a floresta tropical, que há muito tempo era considerada imune ao fogo, perdia essa resistência durante secas severas. Para investigar as implicações disso, Nepstad percebeu que eles precisavam de um novo experimento em algum lugar na borda da Amazônia, onde é mais seco o ano todo.

Nepstad vinha passando cada vez mais tempo no estado do Mato Grosso, interessado pela expansão do cultivo de soja na Amazônia. Durante sua busca por um novo local de estudo, o Grupo Amaggi fez um convite extraordinário.

O Grupo Amaggi era, na época, o maior produtor de soja do mundo, e a soja estava rapidamente se tornando o inimigo ambiental número um, à medida que centenas de milhares de acres de florestas eram derrubados para expandir seu cultivo.

“Mas o Grupo Amaggi, uma empresa brasileira, queria se antecipar à questão”, diz Nepstad. A perspectiva de perder um mercado importante na Europa levantou questões sobre o melhor caminho a seguir. Em 2002, eles criaram o primeiro sistema para rastrear as práticas florestais dos agricultores que lhes vendiam soja. Em 2004, eles fizeram um convite a Nepstad para pesquisar as florestas em sua recém-adquirida propriedade Tanguro, um conjunto de fazendas de gado desmatadas que estavam em processo de conversão para campos de soja.

A esperança era que a pesquisa demonstrasse ao mundo o que realmente estava acontecendo nessas enormes fazendas de soja na Amazônia, fornecendo dados que poderiam contribuir para conversas sobre soja sustentável.

“Há vinte anos, havia muitas discussões sobre preservação ambiental e agricultura”, diz a Diretora de ESG, Comunicações e Conformidade do Grupo Amaggi, Juliana de Lavor Lopes. “Esses dois podem criar uma simbiose? Acho que sabíamos que [eles] poderiam trabalhar juntos, mas será que poderíamos provar isso?”

Para Nepstad, o convite também foi a oportunidade perfeita para realizar um experimento de fogo controlado em um local ideal. Após muitos debates, o IPAM decidiu aceitar.

“Muitas pessoas temiam que isso arruinasse nossa reputação, minasse nossa credibilidade junto às organizações de base – muitas ONGs achavam que estávamos nos vendendo”, diz Nepstad. “Algumas pessoas nos acusaram de termos sido comprados pelo Grupo Amaggi.”

Mas Nepstad foi muito claro quanto aos termos da parceria. Eles não aceitariam nenhum dinheiro da empresa além do que o Grupo Amaggi investiu nos prédios do campus da estação de pesquisa. E eles só apoiariam as atividades da fazenda na medida em que a ciência permitisse. A pesquisa relataria com precisão os impactos da agricultura sobre a floresta, sem restrições de publicação

Assim, em 2004, com poucos recursos financeiros, mas acompanhados por uma equipe dedicada de técnicos de campo e pesquisadores dos experimentos de seca no Pará, – alguns dos quais ainda trabalham na estação de campo atualmente – Woodwell e IPAM montaram um acampamento na Tanguro.

A vida na estação

As botas sujas de lama começam a fazer fila do lado de fora da porta do refeitório às 11h50. Donna Lucia serve o almoço pontualmente ao meio-dia.

Maria Lúcia Pinheiro Nascimento administra a cozinha da Tanguro há mais de 16 anos, preparando refeições fartas para cientistas e técnicos de campo famintos três vezes ao dia. O almoço e o jantar geralmente envolvem alguma carne grelhada ou cozida lentamente, arroz, feijão e uma salada fresca ou legumes assados. Hoje tem abóbora, abobrinha e sobras de linguiça e peito do churrasco de ontem à noite. O café da manhã é mais leve – pão de queijo, ovos, pão fresco, frutas e café – preparado e devorado antes do início do trabalho às 7h.

Muitos dos técnicos que vivem e trabalham aqui cinco dias por semana dizem que a Tanguro é como uma segunda casa, e seus colegas, uma segunda família. Para Dona Lúcia, como é chamada pelos funcionários e visitantes, cozinhar para a estação de pesquisa não é como cozinhar para a família. É realmente cozinhar para a família. Seu marido, Sebastião Nascimento, o “Seu Bate”, foi um dos primeiros técnicos de campo a trabalhar no experimento de seca no Pará. Ele voou para se juntar à equipe da Tanguro um ano após a fundação da empresa e trouxe sua família um ano depois, incluindo seu filho, Ebis Pinheiro de Nascimento, que também entrou como técnico de campo. Um terceiro técnico do Pará, Raimundo Mota Quintino, conhecido como “Santarém”, juntou-se à família quando se casou com a filha de Dona Lúcia.

“Estou com minha família”, diz ela. “Isso me traz alegria.”

Com ou sem parentesco, a equipe da Tanguro trabalha em conjunto, como uma família. A cooperação e o respeito são essenciais em um lugar tão remoto e desconectado (o wifi só se estende a cerca de 18 metros do prédio da cantina) como a Tanguro.

“Brincamos que é como se fosse o ‘Big Brother’”, diz o gerente de campo Darlisson Nunes da Costa. “Mas estamos realmente unidos e nos respeitamos mutuamente. É um ambiente maravilhoso para se trabalhar”.

Também pode ser um ambiente fisicamente desafiador, com longos dias de calor e umidade, preocupações com a segurança em uma floresta cheia de cobras e onças, porcos selvagens territoriais e terrenos que podem facilmente causar uma torção no tornozelo. Ao mesmo tempo, garantindo que os cientistas obtenham os dados de que precisam.

Todo técnico de campo precisa ser adaptável e versátil, pois, além dos horários das refeições, não há rotina diária. Sua manhã pode envolver o corte de videiras para encontrar um caminho para um riacho escondido, selecionado a partir de imagens de satélite como um local de amostragem. A tarde pode ser dedicada à solução de problemas em uma das torres de monitoramento de carbono.

“Não podemos dizer que temos um trabalho monótono”, diz Seu Bate. “Fazemos de tudo um pouco.”

Mesmo assim, cada um dos técnicos desenvolveu suas especialidades ao longo das décadas. Santarém ainda usa as habilidades de aquaviário de seu trabalho anterior como guia de pesca na cidade portuária do Pará que lhe deu o apelido. Ele leva a canoa para os reservatórios com frequência, ajudando os pesquisadores a extraírem núcleos de sedimentos. Seu Bate pode construir o que você precisar – seja a base de alumínio para uma câmara flutuante de monitoramento de metano ou um colar personalizado para segurar tubos de núcleo de solo pesados enquanto você coleta amostras, basta dar a ele 20 minutos e algumas ferramentas elétricas. Nunes da Costa mantém as atividades de campo da equipe organizadas a cada semana e consegue, sem esforço, abrir um caminho claro na floresta. O Ebis gosta de coletar dados, especialmente quando isso envolve a coleta de amostras de água ou de peixes nos cursos d’água de Tanguro. Para o coordenador de projetos científicos da estação, Dr. Leonardo Maracahipes-Santos, escalar a torre de carbono de 35 metros é como caminhar.

As pessoas que visitam a Tanguro variam. Às vezes, as semanas passam com apenas os técnicos de campo na residência e, às vezes, as pequenas casas em estilo de cabine e a alegre cantina da estação estão repletas de hóspedes.

Esta primavera já foi bastante movimentada. Maracahipes-Santos cuida das atividades diárias e organiza a equipe rotativa de visitantes. Em poucas semanas, ele passou de acompanhar

uma equipe de jornalistas brasileiros pelos locais de estudo, a trabalhar com colaboradores do Instituto Max Planck na manutenção de rotina das torres de carbono e a coordenar conversas entre pesquisadores visitantes e representantes do Grupo Amaggi sobre a remoção de várias barragens na propriedade.

E mesmo durante as semanas mais calmas, ainda há muita ciência a ser feita – coleta de amostras para estudos em andamento, execução de análises de dados, verificação de equipamentos. É difícil conseguir um dia de folga na Tanguro, mas pelo menos nunca é entediante.

“É muito interessante, porque fazemos parte de um projeto grandioso, que é montar experimentos em campo junto com os cientistas”, diz Nunes da Costa. “Nós nos sentimos um pouco como cientistas porque todo esse negócio começa no chão. Podemos começar com um pedaço de madeira colocado no chão e chegar até um artigo científico. Tenho muito orgulho. Não apenas de mim, mas de toda a equipe.”

Por sua vez, Dona Lucia se orgulha de alimentar a ciência na Tanguro.

“Tenho muito orgulho de estar em uma empresa como esta, hoje”, diz Dona Lúcia. “Hoje em dia, para trabalhar em uma empresa como essa, é preciso ter um diploma, e eu não tenho. Não tenho diploma de gastronomia. Não tenho nenhum diploma. Mas aprendo todos os dias”.

Um laboratório natural

O trabalho de campo termina às 16h, deixando Macedo, Atwood, Nunez da Costa e eu suados e exaustos após passar uma tarde vagando por áreas úmidas acidentadas em busca de leitos de riachos. A Atwood estava colocando medidores de temperatura a cada 500 metros acima e abaixo dos reservatórios. Ela está interessada nos impactos que esses pequenos corpos d’água têm sobre a bacia hidrográfica e até onde esses impactos se estendem. No entanto, os riachos amazônicos muitas vezes passam por segmentos intransponíveis de pântano, de modo que encontrar os locais de amostragem exige uma caminhada vigorosa e um bom facão.

Após a caminhada, encontramos o grupo de jornalistas visitantes no reservatório de Darro. Um dos maiores reservatórios de Tanguro, o Darro fornece água para a estação de pesquisa para chuveiros e limpeza. Em dias especialmente quentes, também é um ótimo local para nadar.

A água é quente – mais quente do que os riachos próximos, os dados de temperatura de Atwood confirmaram – mas ainda assim mais fria do que o ar abafado. Também é transparente. Nossos pés podem ser vistos pisando na faixa de água mais fria lá embaixo. Reflexos brancos e ondulantes se formam na superfície, um espelho perfeito das nuvens acima.

Na Amazônia, a água é tudo. É isso que torna possível a existência de florestas exuberantes. É o que liga uma fazenda de soja no Mato Grosso a estuários na foz do rio Amazonas. E é isso que conecta essa região ao clima global. As nuvens que se aglomeram acima de Darro ficam mais pesadas e mais escuras com a chuva enquanto nadamos. Embora parte dessa chuva caia de volta à Terra aqui, outra parte é empurrada para fora dos trópicos para cair em outros lugares.

“A água faz duas coisas”, diz o diretor do programa Woodwell Tropics, Dr. Mike Coe. “Primeiro: a chuva está caindo em outro lugar. Segundo: água é energia. É preciso uma enorme quantidade de energia para evaporar a água e essa energia é liberada em outro lugar quando chove. Assim, a energia do sol que cai aqui é transportada para todo o mundo. Isso é muito importante. Isso define o clima”.

Isso significa que, por meio da água, as mudanças aqui têm o potencial de causar grandes mudanças em todo o mundo. A localização da Tanguro em uma região da Amazônia que sofreu intenso desmatamento para a agricultura há apenas algumas décadas torna-a um local ideal para estudar essa causa e efeito.

“Quando você remove as florestas da paisagem, você muda algumas coisas fundamentalmente que não podem ser desfeitas”, diz Macedo. “Você altera a quantidade de água nos córregos, altera a profundidade de enraizamento das plantas na paisagem, altera todo o ciclo hidrológico.”

A Tanguro é bastante representativa das mudanças ocorridas em toda a região. É um mosaico de florestas naturais, campos de soja e algodão e alguns bosques de eucaliptos plantados. Algumas de suas bacias hidrográficas estão completamente dentro dos limites da floresta, outras passam completamente por terras agrícolas. Alguns riachos têm florestas bem preservadas ao longo de suas margens, enquanto outros estão em processo de restauração. As espécies amazônicas se misturam com as da savana brasileira. Está se tornando mais quente e mais seco à medida que o clima muda. Para os cientistas climáticos e ecologistas da Woodwell e do IPAM, esse é o laboratório natural perfeito.

Como o primeiro projeto de pesquisa lançado naquele laboratório, o experimento com fogo ganhou muita atenção.

“O Grupo Amaggi mobilizou a sociedade, havia jornalistas, repórteres de jornais e bombeiros. Pessoas da empresa e pessoas das cidades locais”, lembra Nepstad. Era um território novo, queimando intencionalmente a floresta para saber como isso mudava a paisagem. “Foi muito emocionante.”

A cada novo ano de queima, as percepções se revelavam. Em um ano particularmente quente e seco, a floresta queimou ainda mais do que o previsto. Nepstad se lembra de ter visto as chamas, na altura das canelas, ainda queimando às 2h da manhã seguinte. A mortalidade das árvores depois disso saltou de 6% para 50%.

“Isso foi trágico para aquele trecho de floresta”, diz Macedo. “Mas produziu percepções realmente importantes. Quase presciente. Basta olhar para 2023: foi um ano incrivelmente seco na Amazônia e, de repente, vimos florestas no meio da floresta tropical – áreas que costumavam ser muito úmidas para queimar agora podem queimar durante uma grande seca.”

Com o experimento de fogo em andamento, ainda havia quase 200.000 acres de terra disponíveis para estudo, então Nepstad convidou pesquisadores como Macedo, Coe e o Dr. Paulo Brando, que trabalhou com Nepstad no Pará, para explorar que outras histórias a Tanguro poderia contar sobre a Amazônia. Em seus 20 anos de história, mais de 180 artigos foram publicados a partir de pesquisas na estação, variando em tópicos desde mudanças hidrológicas até os limites climáticos da agricultura produtiva, a degradação do carbono florestal e o valor dos excrementos de anta para restauração. Brando atribui os resultados prolíficos da estação ao conhecimento de sua equipe.

“Parte da magia da Tanguro é aprender com as pessoas que trabalham há 20 anos na floresta. Eles têm um senso intuitivo do que está acontecendo com a saúde dessas florestas”, diz Brando.

Outro aspecto exclusivo da localização da Tanguro é sua posição em relação ao ecossistema maior. As centenas de pequenos riachos que cruzam a Tanguro formam as cabeceiras do rio Xingu, um importante afluente do tronco principal do Amazonas. Tanguro fica a apenas 60 quilômetros da Terra Indígena Xingu, por onde corre o rio de mesmo nome. Quaisquer distúrbios a montante de nutrientes, sedimentos ou fluxo de saída do córrego têm o potencial de se propagar até a reserva, afetando os meios de subsistência das comunidades indígenas.

“Os cursos d’água que estamos explorando na Tanguro fluem para a Reserva do Xingu. Portanto, é importante entender essas questões científicas de como a qualidade da água está sendo afetada pela agricultura como uma questão transfronteiriça”, diz Macedo. “A água conecta tudo.”

Conexão com a comunidade

Quando a Coordenadora Geral da Tanguro, Dra. Ludmila Rattis, iniciou sua pesquisa de pós-doutorado na estação de campo, Canarana era uma cidade diferente – pequena e dominada por homens o suficiente para que uma cientista ambiental não tivesse esperança de permanecer anônima. Rattis via seu nome escrito na comnda do bar como “menina do IPAM”. Ao andar na rua, sentia os olhares e às vezes era abordada por pessoas perguntando se ela trabalhava com os indígenas.

Era um lugar difícil de se estar, lembra ela. “Eu me sentia observada o tempo todo. Eu não podia fazer nada sem trazer comigo o nome de uma instituição. E a conexão com a Internet era de menos de um megabyte, não dava para assistir filmes em streaming”, diz Rattis. “Abrir um e-mail era um desafio.”

Trabalhar para uma organização ambiental sem fins lucrativos em uma cidade agrícola que deve sua própria existência ao desmatamento é, às vezes, difícil de navegar. Mas a agricultura está entrelaçada no DNA da Estação de Campo de Tanguro. Os cientistas do clima podem se arrepiar ao ver escavadeiras pressionando a vegetação rasteira, mas em última análise, a proximidade com a agricultura aqui levou a algumas das percepções mais valiosas da estação.

“Por estarmos neste lugar há muito tempo, podemos observar as mudanças à medida que elas ocorrem e dizer algo com muito mais confiança sobre os impactos mais amplos na Amazônia”, diz Macedo.

A parceria com o Grupo Amaggi também ajudou a conectar a ciência a grandes decisões no setor de soja. Em 2012, quando os debates sobre o futuro do Código Florestal brasileiro estavam em pleno andamento, Nepstad foi convidado a participar de uma viagem de campo a Tanguro com os principais legisladores que estavam elaborando o novo código, incluindo o senador Blairo Maggi, proprietário do Grupo Amaggi. Ver em primeira mão os experimentos de restauração florestal na estação ajudou a demonstrar a viabilidade da implementação das novas proteções. O Código Florestal foi revisado e a maioria de suas restrições ao desmatamento ainda está em vigor.

“Foi realmente a ciência que abriu essas portas”, diz Nepstad.

A pesquisa de Rattis, em particular, contribuiu para fortalecer as parcerias com fazendas da região. Ela passou o ano em Canarana conversando com os agricultores sobre a experiência deles com as mudanças climáticas – estações chuvosas que começam mais tarde, queda na produtividade das colheitas – e perguntando quais informações os modelos climáticos poderiam ser úteis. Aos poucos, à medida que Rattis apresentava a eles seus resultados, mostrando-lhes as previsões de chuva e temperatura e mantendo um diálogo aberto, ela construiu um relacionamento que não só fortaleceu sua relação com a comunidade, mas ajudou a orientar pesquisas futuras.

“Os fazendeiros lhe dirão se algo parece certo ou não, e 90% das vezes eles dirão ‘uau, você pode me enviar esse gráfico? Quero mostrar aos meus vizinhos’”, diz Rattis. Um novo estudo começou depois que conversas com um gerente de fazenda sugeriram uma conexão entre as florestas e a produção agrícola. “Eu disse que estávamos nos perguntando se as plantações produziriam mais perto da floresta, e ele disse: ‘isso faz sentido porque as plantas de algodão são maiores perto da borda da mata’.”

Os pesquisadores da Tanguro também estabeleceram conexões com os moradores da reserva indígena do Xingu, nas proximidades, formando parcerias com as aldeias para estudar os impactos a jusante dos incêndios recorrentes. Um professor da Universidade Federal da Amazônia (UFRA), Dr. Divino Silvério, que realizou sua pesquisa de doutorado no Tanguro, liderou grande parte desse trabalho.

“A ideia principal era integrar o conhecimento científico que tínhamos na Tanguro com o conhecimento tradicional dos povos indígenas, para quantificar melhor os impactos do fogo sobre as espécies que são usadas por eles para alimentação, construção e medicina”, diz Silvério.

Durante o estudo, Silvério e sua equipe de pesquisa visitaram a reserva do Xingu para discutir a pesquisa e compartilhar percepções. Eles também forneceram bolsas de estudo a vários estudantes indígenas para ajudar na coleta de dados e visitar a Tanguro para uma troca de conhecimentos.

“Os povos indígenas vêm manejando bem as florestas há séculos”, diz Silvério. “Mas agora temos a mudança climática. Está se tornando realmente urgente ter esse tipo de conversa no sentido de encontrar algumas soluções para mitigar os impactos das mudanças climáticas sobre os meios de subsistência dessas pessoas.”

Rattis também acredita que a Tanguro tem um papel a desempenhar como um centro educacional. No último ano, ela tem trabalhado para criar um prêmio de redação para estudantes locais, homenageando um funcionário do IPAM que defendeu a educação ambiental nos anos 2000.

“A Tanguro que temos hoje é o legado de muitas pessoas que trabalharam lá”, diz Rattis.

Como será o futuro?

Maracahipes-Santos já escalou essa torre milhares de vezes. Hoje ele sobe mais uma vez para prender uma corda sobressalente em um de seus suportes superiores. Se um de nós desmaiar

no meio da escalada, pelo menos eles poderão nos descer com cuidado. Se tudo der certo, escalaremos os 35 metros para cima e para trás com nossa própria força, ancorados no centro da torre com um mecanismo que trava como um cinto de segurança sob força repentina para baixo.

A torre em si é essencialmente uma escada coberta de vegetação, com vários medidores de gás e de temperatura presos a postes finos no topo. Três deles estão localizados ao redor da Tanguro para monitorar o movimento de dióxido de carbono, vapor de água e outros gases que entram e saem da paisagem. Essa torre em particular fica a 15 minutos de caminhada em uma seção de floresta intacta que foi usada como local de controle durante o experimento de incêndio.

Depois de verificar e verificar novamente minhas cordas, um grito de Maracahipes-Santos, que já estava no topo, sinalizou que era hora de começar a escalada.

Uma mão sobe um degrau, depois a outra. Os pés acompanham. Passo, passo, respire. Você deve se inclinar para trás, deixar que o arnês o segure e empurrar seu peso para cima com as pernas, mas um instinto inabalável me faz puxar com força a escada, de modo que, quando chego ao topo, meus antebraços estão tremendo. Suada, ofegante, corada, mas finalmente sobre o galpão. Maracahipes-Santos sorri e prende meu gancho de segurança em um dos suportes. Aqui em cima, somos mais altos do que as árvores.

Do alto da torre, você pode ler a história e o futuro desse lugar apenas virando a cabeça. A floresta se estende até o horizonte em uma direção, um mosaico ininterrupto de verde profundo. Em outro, é possível ver retângulos enormes de terra vermelha e tapetes uniformes de soja verde-clara cortados na paisagem. Em algum lugar escondido atrás de um bosque de eucaliptos plantados estão os telhados de metal corrugado da estação de pesquisa. A chuva está caindo no horizonte.

Há poucas décadas, tudo isso era floresta. Apenas outro aglomerado impossivelmente espesso de organismos vivos que respiram, morrem e crescem novamente em um dos ecossistemas de maior biodiversidade do planeta. Agora, os instrumentos de sensoriamento remoto documentam seu declínio.

A pesquisa na Tanguro é orientada por uma grande questão: “Qual é o futuro da Amazônia?” Mas a resposta a essa pergunta dependerá: dos cientistas que continuarem a vir a Tanguro para entender como esse ecossistema está mudando; dos técnicos de campo que tornarem possível conduzir a ciência na floresta com segurança; dos fazendeiros que se orgulharem de cuidar das florestas que estão em suas terras; dos funcionários do governo que criarem políticas que reflitam a ciência; e das decisões de pessoas a milhares de quilômetros de distância para reverter a mudança climática.

“Quando se faz uma pesquisa sobre essa floresta, percebe-se que é um sistema incrivelmente resistente, que agora está enfrentando estresses e distúrbios cada vez mais fortes. Portanto, ele precisa de ajuda e precisa ter uma chance, mas continuará”, diz Nepstad. “E acho que a Tanguro tem um papel importante nisso.”

Os últimos 20 anos na Tanguro contribuíram para direcionar a Amazônia para um futuro mais promissor. O que os próximos 20 anos nos trarão?

“Minha esperança”, diz Rattis, “é que em 20 anos não estaremos mais lidando com o desmatamento. ‘Lembra-se daquela vez em que tivemos que convencer as pessoas a não derrubar a floresta? Estou muito feliz por termos superado isso’”.

The sky opens up just as our truck leaves the last stretch of paved road. Water Program Director Dr. Marcia Macedo squints to stay focused on what she can see between wipes of the windshield. Within minutes, our path is transformed from a dirt road into a riverbed of bright orange mud, rutted from the passing of heavy trucks carrying soy off surrounding farms. Macedo swerves to dodge bumps and dips, but pretty soon there are more of them than there is flat road. We brace for the puddles, peering out windows spattered with orange spray.

It’s a Monday morning in the rainy season at the edge of the Amazon, and we’re commuting to work.

Tanguro Field Station lies about an hour’s drive from Canarana, the nearest town, located in a region of Brazil sometimes referred to as the arc of deforestation. Several decades ago, agriculture began surging into the southern reaches of the Amazon rainforest here, carving out rectangular patches of farmland from primary forest. For most of our drive, we are flanked only by mega-fields of soybean or scrubby cattle pastures.

Macedo, who has been conducting research at Tanguro since 2007, remembers a time when the drive could be marked by crossing a threshold from the Cerrado—Brazil’s woody savanna biome—into the Amazon. Now, clearing near the road has obscured that natural transition. Eventually clumps of lush green loom closer out of the rain and we know we’re nearly there.

Since its founding in 2004, Tanguro has offered researchers from around the world the opportunity to investigate big questions about how climate change and deforestation are affecting the Amazon. Macedo and her team have come to study Tanguro’s streams and reservoirs. 

We pull to a stop outside the research station, hauling suitcases wrapped in plastic trash bags out of the truck bed. Research assistant Zoë Dietrich, clutches several vital electronic components to her chest, ferrying them to a screened-in porch to keep them out of the rain. Postdoctoral researcher Dr. Abra Atwood starts digging out sediment core tubes from a pile of equipment. The clouds drift off and the work day at Tanguro begins.

I. The Founding

It was a controversial decision at the time. “The decision to set up on the Tanguro ranch almost drove a wedge through us,” recalls Tanguro founder, Dr. Daniel Nepstad. “We had a discussion that lasted two days.”

Fourteen years prior, Nepstad had established the Amazon program at Woodwell Climate (then the Woods Hole Research Center) in the state of Pará, studying the resilience of Amazon forests during long dry seasons. This work gave rise to a new research institute based in Brazil. In 1995, Nepstad co-founded the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) in Belém to pursue policy-relevant science that could inform sustainable development in the Amazon. Woodwell Climate and IPAM began conducting simulated drought experiments and found that the rainforest, long thought to be immune to fire, lost that resistance during severe droughts. To investigate the implications of this, Nepstad realized, they needed a new experiment somewhere at the edge of the Amazon, where it’s drier year-round.

Nepstad had been spending more and more time in the state of Mato Grosso, fascinated by the expansion of soybean cultivation into the Amazon there. During his search for a new study site, Grupo Amaggi reached out with a remarkable invitation.

Grupo Amaggi was, at the time, the largest soy producer in the world, and soy was rapidly becoming environmental enemy number one, as hundreds of thousands of acres of forests fell to expand its cultivation.

“But Grupo Amaggi, a Brazilian company, wanted to get out in front of the issue,” says Nepstad. The prospect of losing a major market in Europe raised questions about the best way forward. In 2002 they set up the first system for tracing the forest practices of the farmers who sold them soy. And in 2004 they extended an invitation to Nepstad to study the forests on their newly acquired Tanguro property— an amalgamation of previously-cleared cattle ranches they were in the process of converting to soy fields. 

The hope was that the research would demonstrate to the world what was really happening in these massive soy farms in the Amazon, providing data that could contribute to conversations around sustainable soy.

“Twenty years ago there were lots of discussions about environmental preservation and agriculture,” says Grupo Amaggi’s ESG, Communications and Compliance Director, Juliana de Lavor Lopes. “Could those two create a symbiosis? I think we knew [they] could work together, but could we prove that?”

 For Nepstad, the invitation was also the perfect opportunity to run a controlled fire experiment in an ideal location. After much debate, IPAM decided to accept. 

“There were a lot of folks worried that this would ruin our reputation, undermine our credibility with grassroots organizations— a lot of NGOs felt like we were selling out,” says Nepstad. “Some people accused us of being bought off by Grupo Amaggi.”

But Nepstad was very clear on the terms of the partnership. They would accept no money from the company other than what Grupo Amaggi invested in the buildings on the research station campus. And they would only support the farm’s activities as far as the science allowed. The research would accurately report the impacts of agriculture on the forest, with no restrictions on publication. 

So in 2004, barely funded, but accompanied by a dedicated team of field technicians and researchers from the drought experiments in Pará— some of whom are still employed at the field station today— Woodwell and IPAM set up camp at Tanguro.

II. Life at the Station

Muddy boots start lining up outside the door to the cafeteria at 11:50am. Dona Lúcia sets lunch out promptly at noon. 

Maria Lúcia Pinheiro Nascimento has run the kitchen at Tanguro for over 16 years, cooking filling meals for hungry scientists and field technicians three times a day. Lunch and dinner usually involve some slow-cooked or grilled meat, rice, beans, and a fresh salad or roasted vegetables. Today there’s abóbora, a green-skinned pumpkin, and leftover sausage and brisket from last night’s churrasco. Breakfast is a lighter affair— pão de queijo, eggs, fresh bread, fruit, and coffee— set out and scarfed down before work starts at 7 am.

Many of the technicians who live and work here five days a week say Tanguro is like a second home, their peers a second family. For Dona Lúcia, as she’s called by staff and visitors alike, cooking for the research station isn’t just like cooking for family. It is cooking for family. Her husband, Sebastião Nascimento, “Seu Bate”, was one of the original field technicians working on the drought experiment in Pará. He flew down to join the crew at Tanguro a year after it was founded and brought his family down a year later, including his son, Ebis Pinheiro de Nascimento, who also joined as a field technician. A third technician from Pará, Raimundo Mota Quintino, known as “Santarém”, joined the family when he married Dona Lúcia’s daughter. 

“I’m with my family,” she says. “It gives me joy.”

Related or not, the team at Tanguro works together like a family. Cooperation and respect are essential in a place as remote and disconnected (wifi only extends 60ft from the cafeteria building) as Tanguro. 

“We joke that it’s like “Big Brother”,” says Field Manager, Darlisson Nunes da Costa. “But we are really united and we respect each other. That’s a wonderful environment to work in.” 

It can also be a physically challenging environment, with long days in the heat and humidity, navigating safety concerns in a forest full of snakes and jaguars, territorial wild pigs and terrain that could easily twist an ankle. All the while ensuring the scientists get the data they need.

Every field technician has to be adaptable and multi-talented, because aside from meal times there is no day-to-day routine. Your morning might involve slashing vines to find a path to a hidden stream, selected from satellite imagery as a sampling location. The afternoon could be spent troubleshooting errors at one of the carbon-monitoring towers. 

“We can’t say we have a fixed job,” says Seu Bate. “We do a bit of everything.”

All the same, the technicians have each developed their specialties over the decades. Santarém still uses waterman skills from his previous job as a fishing guide in the port city in Pará that gave him his nickname. He takes the canoe out on the reservoirs often, helping researchers pull sediment cores. Seu Bate can build whatever you need— whether it’s the aluminum base for a floating methane-monitoring chamber, or a custom collar to hold unwieldy soil core tubes while you sample them, just give him 20 minutes and some power tools. Nunes da Costa keeps the team’s field activities organized each week and can effortlessly cut a clear path through the forest. Ebis enjoys data collection, especially when it involves sampling the water or fishes in Tanguro’s waterways. For the station’s Scientific Projects Coordinator, Dr. Leonardo Maracahipes-Santos, climbing the 118 ft carbon tower is just like walking.

Outsider visits to Tanguro fluctuate. Sometimes weeks pass with only the field techs in residence, and sometimes the station’s small cabin-style houses and cheerful cafeteria are crawling with guests.

This spring has already been a busy one. Maracahipes-Santos handles day-to-day operations and organizes the rotating cast of visitors. In a few short weeks, he went from touring  a crew of Brazilian journalists around the study sites, to working with collaborators from the Max Planck institute on routine maintenance to the carbon towers, to coordinating conversations between visiting researchers and Grupo Amaggi representatives about removing several dams on the property. 

And even during slow weeks, there is plenty of science left to do—collecting samples for ongoing studies, running data analyses, checking on equipment. A day off is hard to come by at Tanguro, but at least it’s never boring.

“It’s very interesting, because we are part of a grand thing, which is to set up experiments in the field together with scientists,” says Nunes da Costa. “And we feel a little bit like scientists, because this whole business all starts on the ground. We can start from a piece of wood placed on the ground, and get all the way up to a scientific article. I feel very proud. Not only of me, but of the whole team.”

For her part, Dona Lúcia takes great pride in feeding the science at Tanguro. 

“I’m very proud to be in a company like this, today,” says Dona Lúcia. “Nowadays, to work in a company like this, you need a degree, and I don’t have one. I don’t have a culinary degree. I don’t have any degree. But I learn every day.”

III. A Natural Laboratory

Field work wraps up at 4pm, leaving Macedo, Atwood, Nunes da Costa, and me sweaty and exhausted from an afternoon spent trudging through uneven wetlands to find stream channels. Atwood was dropping temperature loggers every 500 meters above and below reservoirs. She’s interested in the impacts these small water bodies have on the watershed, and how far downstream those impacts extend. But Amazonian streams often twist through impassable segments of marsh, so finding the sample sites requires vigorous hiking and a good machete. 

After our hike, we rendezvous with the group of visiting journalists at the Darro Reservoir. One of the largest reservoirs at Tanguro, the Darro provides water to the research station for showers and cleaning. On especially hot days, it also makes a great swimming hole. 

The water is warm—warmer than nearby streams, Atwood’s temperature data has confirmed—but still cooler than the muggy air. It’s also glassy clear. Our feet are visible treading the band of colder water down below. Billowing white reflections form on the surface, a perfect mirror of the clouds above.

Water is everything in the Amazon. It’s what makes the lush forests possible. It’s what connects a soy farm in Mato Grosso to estuaries at the yawing mouth of the Amazon River. And it’s what connects this region to the global climate. The clouds clustering above Darro grow heavier and darker with rain while we swim. Although much of that rain will fall back to Earth here, a large portion of it gets pushed out from the tropics to fall in other places.

“Water does two things,” says Woodwell Tropics Program Director, Dr. Mike Coe. “One: it’s rainfall somewhere else. Two: water is energy. It takes a huge amount of energy to evaporate water and that energy gets released somewhere else when it rains. So the energy from the sun that falls here gets transported around the world. That’s huge. That drives climate.”

Which means that, through water, changes here have the potential to cause major changes across the globe. Tanguro’s location in a region of the Amazon that underwent intense deforestation for agriculture just a few decades ago makes it an ideal place to study that cause and effect.

“Once you remove forests from the landscape, you change some things fundamentally that you can’t really undo,” says Macedo. “You change the amount of water in streams, you change the rooting depth of the plants on the landscape, you change the entire hydrological cycle.” 

Tanguro is pretty representative of the changes experienced across the region. It’s a patchwork of natural forest, soy and cotton fields, and some planted eucalyptus groves. Some of its watersheds lie completely within the bounds of the forest, others run completely through agricultural land. Some streams have well preserved forests along their banks, while others are in the process of restoration. Amazonian species mix with those from the Brazilian savanna. It’s becoming hotter and drier as the climate changes. For the climate scientists and ecologists at Woodwell and IPAM, it’s the perfect natural laboratory. 

As the first research project launched in that laboratory, the fire experiment garnered much fanfare.

“Grupo Amaggi had mobilized society, there were journalists and newspaper reporters and firefighters. People from the company and people from the local towns,” recalls Nepstad. It was new territory, intentionally burning the forest to learn how it changed the landscape. “It was really exciting.”

With each new year of burning, insights revealed themselves. One particularly hot, dry year, the forest burned even more than predicted. Nepstad recalled seeing flames, shin-high, still burning at 2 am the next morning. Tree mortality afterward jumped from its usual 6% up to 50%.

“That was tragic for that patch of forest,” says Macedo. “But it has yielded really important insights. Almost prescient. Just look at 2023: it was an incredibly dry year in the Amazon, and all of a sudden we saw fires in the very middle of the rainforest—areas that used to be much too wet to burn can now burn during a big drought.” 

With the fire experiment underway, there was still nearly 200,000 acres of land available to study, so Nepstad invited researchers like Macedo, Coe, and Dr. Paulo Brando, who worked with Nepstad in Pará, to explore what other stories Tanguro might be able to tell about the Amazon. In its 20 year history, over 180 papers have been published from research at the station, ranging in topic from hydrologic changes, to the climatic limits on productive agriculture, to the degradation of forest carbon, to the value of tapir poop for restoration. Brando attributes the station’s prolific results to the knowledge of its staff.

“Part of Tanguro’s magic is to learn from the people who have been working for 20 years in the forest. They have an intuitive sense of what is happening with these forests’ health,” says Brando.

Another unique aspect of Tanguro’s location is where it sits in relation to the larger ecosystem. The hundreds of small streams that criss-cross Tanguro form the headwaters of the Xingu River—a major tributary to the main stem of the Amazon. Tanguro is just 60 kilometers from the Xingu Indigenous Territory, through which the river of the same name runs. Any upstream disturbances to nutrients, sediments, or stream outflow have the potential to ripple down to the reserve, impacting the livelihoods of Indigenous communities within. 

“The headwater streams that we’re studying here at Tanguro drain into the Xingu reserve. So, these scientific questions of how water quality is being impacted by agriculture are important to understand as a cross-boundary issue,” says Macedo. “Water connects everything.”

IV. Connecting to the Community

When Tanguro General Coordinator, Dr. Ludmila Rattis, started her postdoctoral research at the field station, Canarana was a different town—small and male-dominated enough that a female environmental scientist had no hope of staying anonymous. Rattis would see her name written on bar tabs as “IPAM’s girl.” She went for runs and felt the stares.

It was a hard place to be, she recalls. “I felt watched all the time. I couldn’t do anything without bringing with me the name of an institution. And the internet connection was less than one megabyte, so Netflix was a challenge,” Rattis says. “Opening an email was a challenge.”

Working for an environmental non-profit in a farm town that owes its very existence to deforestation is sometimes tricky to navigate. But agriculture is woven into the DNA of Tanguro Field Station. Climate scientists may flinch to see bulldozers pressing into the undergrowth, but ultimately the proximity to agriculture here is what has yielded some of the station’s most valuable insights. 

“By being here in this place for a long time, we’re able to observe changes as they happen, and say something much more confidently about what the broader impacts are on the Amazon,” says Macedo.

The partnership with Grupo Amaggi has also helped connect science to big decisions in the soy sector. In 2012, when debates over the future of Brazil’s forest code were roaring away, Nepstad was invited to join a field trip to Tanguro with the main lawmakers shaping the new code—including Senator Blairo Maggi, an owner of Grupo Amaggi. Seeing firsthand the experiments with forest restoration at the station helped demonstrate the feasibility of implementing the new protections. The forest code was revised and most of its restrictions on forest clearing are still in place today.

“It was really the science that opened these doors,” says Nepstad. 

Rattis’s research, in particular, has gone a long way toward strengthening partnerships with farms around the region. She spent her year in Canarana talking with farmers about their experience of climate change—rainy seasons starting later, crop yields dropping—and asking what information they might find useful from climate models. Slowly, as she came back to them with her results, showing them rainfall and temperature predictions and keeping a dialogue open, she built a rapport that not only strengthened her relationship with the community, but helped guide future research. 

“The farmers will tell you whether something looks right or not, and 90% of the time they’d say ‘wow, can you please send me that graphic? I want to show my neighbors,’” says Rattis. One new study even began after conversations with a farm manager hinted at a connection between forests and crop production. “I said we were wondering if the crops would produce more closer to the forest, and he said, ‘that makes sense because the cotton plants are bigger closer to the forest edge.’”

Researchers at Tanguro have also built connections with residents of the nearby Xingu Indigenous reserve, partnering with villages to study the downstream impacts of recurring fires. A professor with the Federal University of the Amazon (UFRA), Dr. Divino Silvério, who conducted his doctoral research at Tanguro, has led much of this work. 

“The main idea was to integrate the scientific knowledge we had at Tanguro, with the traditional knowledge of the Indigenous people, to better quantify the impacts of fire on species that are used by them for food, construction, and medicine,” says Silvério. 

 During the study, Silvério and his research team visited the Xingu reserve to discuss the research and share insights. They also provided scholarships to several Indigenous students to help in the data collection and visit Tanguro for a knowledge exchange. 

“Indigenous people have been managing the forests well for centuries,” says Silvério. “But now we have climate change. It’s becoming really urgent to have these kinds of conversations, to come up with some solutions to mitigate the impacts of climate change on the livelihoods of these people.”

Rattis also believes Tanguro has a role to play as an education hub. Over the last year she has been working to create an essay prize for local students, honoring an IPAM employee who championed environmental education in the 2000s.

“The Tanguro we have today is the legacy of the many people that have worked there,” says Rattis.

V. What does the future look like?

Maracahipes-Santos has climbed this tower a thousand times. Today he’s climbing it once more, to anchor a back-up belay line to one of its top struts. If one of us passes out mid-climb, at least they’ll be able to lower us down gently. If all goes well, we will be climbing the 118 feet up and back under our own power, anchored to the center of the tower with a mechanism that locks like a seatbelt under sudden downward force.

The tower itself is essentially an overgrown ladder, with various gas and weather analyzers strapped to spindly poles at the top. There are three of them stationed around Tanguro to monitor the movement of carbon dioxide, water vapor, and other gasses into and out of the landscape. This particular tower is a 15 minute hike into a section of intact forest that was used as the control site during the fire experiment. 

After checking and rechecking my tethers, a shout from Maracahipes-Santos, already at the top, signaled it was time to start the climb.

One hand up a rung, then the other. Feet to follow. Step, step, breathe. You’re supposed to lean back, let the harness hold you and push your weight up with your legs, but an unshakable instinct makes me pull tight to the ladder, so when I reach the top my forearms are shaking. Sweaty, breathless, flushed, but above the canopy at last. Maracahipes-Santos smiles and attaches my safety hook to one of the struts. Up here, we are taller than the trees.

From the top of the tower, you can read the history and future of this place, just by turning your head. Forest stretches to the horizon in one direction, an unbroken mosaic of deep green. In another, you can see massive rectangles of red dirt and uniform carpets of pale green soy cut into the landscape. Somewhere hidden behind a copse of planted eucalyptus are the corrugated metal roofs of the research station. Rain is falling on the horizon. 

Not too many decades ago, this was all forest. Just another impossibly thick cluster of living organisms breathing and dying and growing anew in one of the most densely biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. Now, the vigilant scientific instruments whizzing away up here document its decline. 

Research at Tanguro is driven by one big question: “What is the future of the Amazon?” But the answer to that question will depend — on scientists continuing to come to Tanguro to understand how this ecosystem is changing, on the field technicians making it possible to conduct science in the forest safely, on farmers taking pride in caring for the forests that stand on their land, on government officials building policies that reflect science, and on the decisions of people thousands of miles away to reverse climate change.   

“When you’re doing research on this forest, you realize it is an amazingly tough system that is now being faced with tougher and tougher stresses and disturbances. So it needs help, and it needs to be given a chance, but it will continue,” says Nepstad. “And I think Tanguro has a big role to play in that.”

The past 20 years at Tanguro have done much to point the Amazon towards a more hopeful future. What will the next 20 bring?

“My hope,” says Rattis, “is that in 20 years we won’t be dealing with deforestation anymore. ‘Remember that time when we had to convince people not to cut down the forest? I’m so glad we’re past that.’”