1. World Wildlife Magazine
  2. Summer 2025
In-Depth

Tapajós, Brazil

In their own words, river communities—and bioeconomy entrepreneurs—share their commitment to protecting their Amazon home

Small illustrated map of Brazil

Joelma Lopes twists the tap on the side of the white plastic bin and watches as the glassy gold liquid pours out. Before hitting the bottom of the bucket below, it passes through a fine metal sieve that catches any tiny, remaining flakes of honeycomb.

It’s late afternoon and the sun is burning bright over Lopes’s home near the Tapajós River, deep within the Brazilian Amazon; she’s standing under a wooden overhang prepping the next batch of honey from her native canudo stingless bees. Once the buckets are full, she snaps on their lids and tucks them away until her local Agroextractive Workers of Western Pará Cooperative (ACOSPER) rep travels up the Arapiuns River by boat to Carão, the village where she lives, weighing them and labeling them with her name before taking them back downriver to the town of Santarém.

There, Lopes’s honey will spend several more months at EcoCentro, a processing, storage, and commercialization facility for “sociobiodiversity” or “bioeconomy” products—income-generating products that incorporate societal and natural factors in a sustainable way. The honey will then ferment and be put through a quality assurance process before it can be packaged and sold at local supermarkets.

And that’s just one small part of a much bigger picture. Honey is one of 13 products that, according to a recent study, could reach 2.8% of the regional GDP and employ nearly 950,000 people.

“My work here is not just for me, for my kids, or for my grandkids. It’s for all of humanity. It keeps me here so I can help keep this forest standing for all of us.”

JOELMA LOPES
Honey producer, forest entrepreneur

Community-led, sustainable economic development activities like these (sometimes labeled as part of a “socio-bioeconomy”) are an exciting path forward for the Amazon. With proper support, traditional communities living near the Tapajós River can generate a diversified income that helps them thrive. And that income not only gives elders the means to continue their work, but also to pass it on to future generations, creating opportunities for them to continue protecting the rain forest in the face of innumerous encroaching threats.

“The first time I saw the jars of honey with my name on the labels and information about where it was produced, I was so happy,” Lopes says, smiling at the memory. “Because my work here is not just for me, for my kids, or for my grandkids. It’s for all of humanity. It keeps me here so I can help keep this forest standing for all of us.”

 

The Tapajós River basin stretches across more than 120 million acres of land in the northern Brazilian states of Mato Grosso, Pará, Amazonas, and a small portion of Rondônia. In the last 20 years, the region has lost more than 20% of its forest cover—at some 42,000 square miles, that’s roughly the size of Tennessee or Virginia—to the production of commodities like soy and cattle.

Land grabbing, along with illegal logging, mining, and fishing have all intensified in recent years, resulting in the invasion of protected lands, conflict with traditional communities, and attempts to convince local residents to partake in harmful activities.

Crafts made from local rubber, seeds, oils, and plant fibers entice visitors to the store in Jamaraquá.

“Some people end up participating in these predatory and sometimes illegal activities because of a lack of sustainable economic alternatives,” says Leo Ferreira, a WWF-Brazil conservation specialist and expert in the Tapajós region. “It’s a constant pressure and one that continues to grow.”

To preserve the forest, the Brazilian government, WWF, FUNBIO, and other partners created the Amazon Region Protected Areas (ARPA) program, which to this day is considered the largest tropical forest protection initiative in the world. (Learn more about ARPA.)

Launched in 2002 to support consolidation of more than 150 million acres of protected areas in the Amazon—including the Tapajós River basin—it currently covers 120 conservation areas, including those under full protection, as with biological reserves and national parks, and those designated for sustainable community use. In 2014, the government of Brazil, WWF, and partners launched ARPA for Life, a Project Finance for Permanence initiative that strengthened the financial sustainability of ARPA through a $215 million, 25-year transition fund.

A woman weaving while sitting on a step outside a house

Rosangela Castro Tapajós, of the Urucureá Village handicraft group, demonstrates the traditional weaving techniques she learned from her mother—and that she relishes passing on.

All told, ARPA is reported to have protected more than 652,000 acres of land between 2008 and 2020, avoiding the equivalent of 104 million tons of harmful CO2 emissions—in fact, deforestation levels were just 39% of what they would have been save for ARPA’s support. Now the program is preparing to expand, this time with an even stronger focus on the power and priorities of people like Lopes.

As envisioned, ARPA Communities will build on ARPA’s success by structuring and strengthening the socio-bioeconomy in the original ARPA program’s sustainable use conservation areas, both conserving the forest and offering sustainable economic alternatives, strengthened rights, and better access to public services for the people who live and work there.

Long term, ARPA Communities is being designed to safeguard the rights of forest residents and promote income generation through the sustainable use of biodiversity and reducing destructive illegal activities, degradation, and deforestation.

 

Along its meandering path of more than 1,000 miles, the Tapajós River has great potential for many bioeconomy activities, including community-based tourism. After a scenic boat ride, tourists can explore a variety of riverside communities like Jamaraquá and Vista Alegre do Capixauã, where visitors can learn about local culture through activities like traditional body painting and manioc flour production, and hike into primary forest with breaks to cool off in the calm waters of hidden swimming holes.

The region is also home to numerous community-based businesses focused on a variety of forest products and their sustainable use. In addition to honey, agroforestry projects, which include the planting of sustainable gardens for consumption and sale, are popular along the Tapajós and Arapiuns rivers. The preservation and care of native trees also allow for the collection of fruits, nuts, and seeds, like andiroba, cumaru, and cupuaçu. Oils and butters extracted from andiroba and cupuaçu are often used in makeup and skincare products, while cumaru, also known as tonka bean or the vanilla of the Amazon, is in high demand internationally for the production of perfumes. Together, such products help make native nurseries a promising income-generating bioeconomy activity for traditional Tapajós communities.

In nearby Urucureá, a group of 42 artisans created a collective called Tucumarte. Led by Rosangela Castro Tapajós and Sara Esdrea dos Santos Cardoso, Tucumarte members collect leaves from the tucumã palm trees in their village—some that have been there as long as they can remember, others they’ve planted—which will start to resprout in three months and will be ready to collect again in six. After sliding knives along their edges to remove the thorns that adorn them and leaving them to dry for three days, each artisan takes a batch of the straw home and begins to weave.

People cutting leaves from a plant

In the village of Urucreá, tucumã leaves are arranged before being dyed.

Baskets, potholders, bags, and bracelets are some of Tucumarte’s most common products, all made using a technique often passed down from generation to generation. Castro Tapajós remembers learning from her mother and has since taught her sons and daughters—she even teaches new group members who didn’t have the chance to learn from a parent.

“It’s a source of income, and it’s also beautiful artisanal work,” says Castro Tapajós. “That’s why we make sure to teach it to our children, our grandchildren, the next generations. It’s something that can’t come to an end.”

While some of the straw is used in its natural pale-yellow state, much of it is plunged into pots of boiling water for dyeing, each with a different locally grown plant—jenipapo and turmeric are among the most popular—that releases its natural pigment, turning the tucumã everything from black and deep purple to bright orange, rich red, and mossy green.

Tucumarte has its own shop in the heart of its community, where it sells the artisans’ creations to tourists. The group also takes special orders and sends many of its products to Turiarte, the Forest Tourism and Crafts Cooperative, so that it can put them on display at outdoor markets across the country.

WWF-Brazil and partner organizations like Projeto Saúde e Alegria (PSA) actively support Urucureá’s efforts, helping with the acquisition of equipment, offering training and mentoring to improve administrative processes, and providing access to financial mechanisms and new markets.

With ARPA Communities, that support will go even further, helping communities with things like evaluating the feasibility and potential scale of their sustainable businesses, connecting them with potential investors, and meeting certification requirements regarding the origin and processing of the nature-based products they create.

 

It was 2018 when Lopes first decided to work with bees. She heard that PSA was running a training program for those interested in producing honey. When she was a little girl, her uncles used to head into the same patch of forest where she now lives to collect honey from wild bees and bring it back for the family to enjoy. Curious to know how that same sweet and sticky treat could help sustain her family, she decided to attend.

“Our elders … deserve to rest ... It’s our duty to take over and to make sure the forest that has given us so much keeps standing, not just for our families living here, but for everybody who benefits from what it provides.”

MARYHELLENNA DE OLIVEIRA MATOS
Community leader, São Francisco

“It was that first training session that helped me understand the value and importance of bees,” she says. “I started to love the work and wanted to do more.”

Lopes has since grown her business significantly despite setbacks like the severe drought the lower Tapajós region suffered in 2023. In recent years, her method has become much more sound thanks to the new equipment PSA provided, including the standard-sized buckets, sieves, and bins she’s using now. And with sales being made by weight—in 2023, she received R$38.50 (US$6.83) per kilo of honey—cutting down on losses is crucial to keeping her family afloat.

Lopes hopes honey can keep doing the same for generations to come. She has already given some of her bee boxes to her adult children, hoping they will remain in the lower Tapajós. It would mean more people protecting the forest from ever-encroaching threats, she says, just by being present on the land and showing how it can be sustainably used.

 

Lopes is not the only one thinking about the financial future of the families in the lower Tapajós and the well-being of the forest where they live. The issue is on the minds of many local, Indigenous, and traditional community leaders in the area, especially as many of the youth who grew up in the region have left in recent years, heading to the nearby town of Santarém or even farther, to cities like Manaus, for education and work prospects missing at home. Without young people to carry on the work of older generations, they know it will come to an end, leaving the forest vulnerable to even more destruction.

“If there are no young people here, there will be nobody to take care of what we have,” says Maryhellenna de Oliveira Matos, one of several community leaders working to show young people that they can have a fruitful future in the forest. “Our elders … deserve to rest; we can’t let everything they’ve worked for go to waste. It’s our duty to take over and to make sure the forest that has given us so much keeps standing, not just for our families living here, but for everybody who benefits from what it provides.”

On the river’s edge at Porto do Veado, a boat awaits travelers returning from a cultural tourism visit to the village of Carão.

De Oliveira Matos is a resident of São Francisco, a community of 26 families that sits on the bank of the Arapiuns River where she grew up; she watched her parents work to protect the forest and support the people who live in it her whole life. In São Francisco, producers work as part of a collective, not only receiving their own pay but also investing in their business and putting money back into the community as a whole. They know the importance of diversifying their income, too—if environmental conditions aren’t favorable, they can go an entire season without collecting honey—so they work on other bioeconomy activities to fill in the gaps.

Aside from honey and manioc flour, they’ve also started a community agroforestry project with trees native to the region, like açaí, andiroba, and cupuaçu. It’s still in the beginning stages—the first round of saplings was planted in 2024—and they don’t expect to be able to harvest for another four or five years, but they know the work they’re doing now will benefit them in the future.

Like their honey, the fruits, seeds, and nuts they collect will be shipped off to EcoCentro, where they’ll be processed, packaged, and prepped for sale, whether marketed as forest-friendly products or incorporated into things like body scrubs and perfumes.

It’s that final step—reaching new buyers far from where they spend their days—that seemed out of reach to Lopes and other forest product producers for too long. With backing from a wider support system that will soon include ARPA Communities and more, they are uniting—across families, villages, tributaries, collectives, and co-ops—to deliver forest-friendly products that will secure a sustainable and reliable future in return.

ARPA Communities is part of Enduring Earth, an ambitious initiative that works with environmental stewards to durably conserve lands and waters, amplify ambition, mobilize resources, and implement sustainable funding to address biodiversity loss, combat climate change, and enhance community prosperity.

 

Natural Solutions

The Amazon rain forest’s natural resources give it a potential value of $7 trillion. Sixty-four forest conservation-compatible products generated an annual revenue of $298 million between 2017 and 2019; if low-carbon agricultural practices and strengthening the bioeconomy are made a priority, an additional $6.4 billion could be added to the Brazilian Amazon’s annual GDP along with 312,000 new jobs.

Bioeconomy activities like these are examples of nature-based solutions—natural systems or processes that help achieve societal goals. Research shows that nature-based solutions in the broader land sector could contribute up to 30% of the climate mitigation needed by 2050 to meet the Paris Agreement’s objective of limiting global warming.

In essence, the forest itself, utilized thoughtfully, could provide new and innovative ways to ensure its own future.

ILLUSTRATIONS © WWF-US/Nik Neves
Acai

AÇAÍ

Long before making its way to US breakfast bowls, açaí was a staple for Amazonians. Chock-full of antioxidants, fiber, and healthy fats, the deep purple berry is not only a superfood favorite but also a popular ingredient in cosmetics—thanks to its earthy smell and anti-inflammatory properties.

Acerola

ACEROLA

Also know as Guarani or Barbados cherry, acerola was introduced to Brazil in the 1950s; the country is now the largest producer, consumer, and exporter of acerola in the world. Packed with vitamin C, the red berry is known for helping to keep the digestive tract healthy. It’s also thought to support hair and skin health, making it a key component in creams and shampoos.

Anderoba

ANDIROBA

The nut from the andiroba tree produces an oil that has many beneficial properties, leading several Indigenous peoples to use it to treat wounds and soothe irritated skin. Rich in Omega-9 and with a woody aroma, it is often used in skincare products to calm and relax.

Cumaru

CUMARU

Also known as tonka beans, the seeds of cumaru trees are extremely fragrant, making them a sought-after ingredient for perfumers around the world. They’re also a popular vanilla substitute, giving baked goods a warmer taste, with hints of cinnamon and spice.

Cupuacu

CUPUAÇU

A close relative of cacao, cupuaçu is a naturally sweet tropical fruit often paired with chocolate or used as its substitute. It’s also processed into butter or powder, which is then used in a variety of skin and hair products.

Jenipapo

JENIPAPO

Most often used by Indigenous peoples as a black dye or paint, jenipapo means “fruit used for painting.” Rich in iron, calcium, and vitamins B1, B2, B5, and C, its yellow pulp is also used to make jams, sweets, syrups, soft drinks, and liqueur.

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