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Highlights At this moment of profound ecological and health crises, there is an urgent call for a fundamental rethinking of hegemonic anthropocentric attitudes. Recent responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have unleashed debates in the scientific and policy arenas on conservation, human-nature relations, animal rights, and efforts to alleviate global poverty among forest-dependent peoples. In this perspective article we seek to make sense out of the ensuing debate and consider possible solutions. We couch this debate first off as a question of who is invading whom? The most serious pandemics in recorded history have their causes rooted in unsustainable anthropic intervention on land and biodiversity. With the world on lockdown, rapid social changes have increased the opportunities to re-think human-nature relations. We argue that transitioning from the current crises demand that we first renew our relationship with nature, recognizing interdependence and finding ways to cushion the overwhelming pressures of teeming humanity while we adapt to nature's response in the guise of a pandemic. We show examples of different cultures in the Amazon that could inspire a future rooted in a respectful and intuitive relationship with the natural world. We discuss the possibilities of how to get there considering the current threatening scenario to the indigenous peoples of the Amazon. We conclude by showing that in the process of transitioning from the current crises we may enable a relational cosmopolitics, where humans and other-than-humans are no longer seen as being in opposition but rather as interdependent.

Pervasive tenure insecurity in developing countries is a key challenge for REDD+. Brazil, a leader in REDD+, has advanced efforts to link forest tenure reform and environmental compliance. We describe how these policies have shaped sub-national interventions with detailed data on land tenure and livelihoods in four REDD+ pilot sites in the Brazilian Amazon. Despite different local contexts, REDD+ proponents have converged on a similar strategy of collaborating with government agencies to clarify tenure and pave the way for a mix of regulatory enforcement and incentive-based REDD+ mechanisms. This polycentric governance model holds promise for effective and equitable REDD+ implementation.

The recent accelerated growth rates or efforts to emulate countries that have achieved a rapid pace of economic growth are widely acclaimed as means to uplift millions from poverty. In so doing, however, this rapid economic growth is most likely to coincide with unsustainable levels of consumption, place excessive pressure on life support systems and terrestrial sinks and foreshorten options for the future. Rather than pursuing the “Environmental Kuznets Curve” (EKC) hypothesis that higher income will bring with it the means to reduce the impacts of greater consumption, ecological economists assert that buying our way out of future scarcity with fast growth is indeed contradictory with sustainability. To better understand these contradictions and explore potential institutional innovations that may enable developing nations to better confront them (in effect, “tunneling under” the EKC), this article refers to recent experience in the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa)...

This paper aims to contribute new insights globally and regionally on how carbon forest mitigation contributes to sustainable development in South America. Carbon finance has emerged as a potential policy option to tackling global climate change, degradation of forests, and social development in poor countries. This paper focuses on evaluating the socioeconomic impacts of a set of forest based mitigation pilot projects that emerged under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The paper reviews research conducted in 2001–2002, drawing from empirical data from four pilot projects, derived from qualitative stakeholder interviews, and complemented by policy documents and literature. Of the four projects studied three are located in frontier areas, where there are considerable pressures for conversion of standing forest to agriculture. In this sense, forest mitigation projects have a substantial role to play in the region. Findings suggest however, that all four projects have experienced cumbersome implementation processes specifically, due to weak social objectives, poor communication, as well as time constraints. In three out of four cases, stakeholders highlighted limited local acceptance at the implementation stages. In the light of these findings, we discuss opportunities for implementation of future forest based mitigation projects in the land use sector.