AMAZON WATCH

Amazon Watch is a nonprofit organization founded in 1996 to protect the rainforest and advance the rights of Indigenous peoples in the Amazon Basin in Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, and Brazil. Amazon Watch works in solidarity with Indigenous and environmental organizations in campaigns for human rights, corporate accountability and the preservation of the Amazon’s ecological systems.

The Amazon is home to 400 distinct Indigenous peoples who are its best stewards. The Amazon River Basin is the planet’s largest tropical rainforest - a stabilizer of the global climate, it contains one-third of all species on Earth and a large percentage of the world’s flowing fresh water. The forest and its peoples are facing grave threats due to deforestation, resource extraction, land grabs, and destructive development projects. At Amazon Watch, we are launching bold, strategic, and timely actions to advance and amplify the voices and solutions of Indigenous peoples across the world.

Stop Amazon Destruction
Amazon Watch resists destruction of the Amazon rainforest, which is perilously close to reaching a tipping point of ecological collapse, by challenging and bringing global media attention to government, corporate and financial actors complicit in deforestation, resource extraction, land grabs, rights abuses, and disastrous development projects.

Amplify Indigenous-led Solutions
Amazon Watch funds, elevates and broadcasts the voices, stories and solutions of Indigenous peoples as they work to uphold their rights, lives and territories. Amazon Watch amplifies Indigenous-led solutions for forest conservation, sustainable livelihoods and regenerative, local economies.

Advance Climate Justice
Amazon Watch centers the voices and solutions of Indigenous communities into policies that address the global climate crisis. Amazon Watch advocates for principled climate action that include proposals and solutions from communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis —especially Indigenous peoples and people of color— who have historically been excluded due to systemic racism and economic oppression.
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With a successful track record spanning 25 years, Amazon Watch is poised to significantly bolster its capacity to forge transformative change. To get there, we are expanding our programs and field teams, and forming increasingly effective local and global partnerships to roll back the trajectory of Amazon destruction. This moment in global history is truly dire for the future of the Amazon rainforest, and with it our collective future. We are poised to transform this tipping point into a turning point for environmental, climate and racial justice.

in 2020 Amazon Watch stepped up global advocacy, communications campaigns and expanded field teams throughout the Amazon. This local presence is dramatically impacting our capacity to amplify the voices and solutions of Indigenous peoples.

We’ve seen significant changes in the financial sector as a result of our advocacy, and have supported partners in the Amazon through a series of extreme crises including COVID-19, fires and floods. 2020 brought significant wins, including the departure of Chilean oil giant GeoPark from “Block 64” in Achuar and Wampis territory, after years of fierce opposition to this oil concession. And in early 2021, four major European banks announced that they would no longer invest in crude oil from the Ecuadorian Amazon.

In solidarity with Indigenous peoples across the Amazon, Amazon Watch coordinated a global call for a moratorium on extractive activities like mining, oil, logging, industrial agriculture, and religious proselytization during COVID-19. Over 250 organizations demanded that Amazonian governments and corporations cease destructive activities on Indigenous lands.

Through tireless efforts by Amazon Watch’s finance/climate justice team campaigners, European banking giants BNP Paribas, Credit Suisse and ING in January, 2021 announced they will exclude exports of Ecuadorian Amazon oil from trading activity, a direct response to the release of an August 2020 report by Stand.earth and Amazon Watch revealing how European banks financed the trade of $10 billion of oil from the Amazon to the US. This is the first time global banks have elected to exclude extractive activities in the Amazon. These commitments represent an end to current major sources of financing for the Amazon oil trade, as these banks were collectively responsible for 50% of financing provided in the last decade.

In 2020, Amazon Watch increased its grant making to Indigenous partners by 400% via the Amazon Defenders Fund (ADF). The $1.4 million of funding sent through the Fund is the largest amount sent in the organization’s history. The ADF centralizes the needs of Indigenous communities as articulated by them, provided with a minimum of bureaucratic barriers and in 2020 provided PPE, medical supplies, oxygen concentrators, and medical transport for communities most affected by COVID-19.

In its 25th year of working in solidarity with Indigenous peoples, holding accountable the corporations responsible for rainforest destruction, and amplifying Indigenous voices on the global stage, Amazon Watch will step up like never before. With a new strategic plan aimed at fulfilling the mission established 25 years ago, Amazon Watch will unleash critical initiatives and strategies in 2021. Scientists emphasize the global climate is at a tipping point. Amazon Watch aims to transform this tipping point into a turning point.