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Protected Areas on an Amazon Frontier: Payments for Environmental Services and the Future of Extractive Reserves in the Terra da Meio

Gabe Schwartzman,Roberto Rezende

Published 2025 in Annals of the American Association of Geographers

ABSTRACT

The Brazilian Amazon is home to a network of protected areas established in the past two decades to provide people living in the forest territorial autonomy and incorporate them into conservation schemes. These protected areas include Indigenous territories, quilombos (African-descended communities), and extractive reserves (where forest communities exchange the right to practice agrarian livelihoods in exchange for conserving forests). These “parks with people” are instances of non-Western models of conservation, departures from the national park models exported from the United States and Europe, operating on the theory that biodiversity is coproduced with social diversity. Inhabited protected areas have become the prime buffer against deforestation in the Amazon, but the futures of such conservation units are uncertain in a changing climate and advancing agricultural frontier. Drawing from long-term research in the extractive reserves of the Terra do Meio, Pará State, in the driest part of the Amazon, we examine the factors that will enable forest communities to maintain forests into the future. To understand such factors, we first detail the locally practiced system of territorial use, the colocação, a mode of landscape management that produces socioecological diversity. Second, we illustrate how improvements in quality of life are necessary for continued conservation outcomes in the extractive reserves. Finally, we discuss how payments for environmental services, a framework that values contributions of people to the production of ecological services, could help communities adapt to climate change and improve quality of life, a framework different from that used in emerging carbon markets

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