Scientists often erase the people who live in and shape the forest

Indigenous territories in Brazil are where deforestation is most effectively controlled. Yet, as Felipe Mammoli notes, Indigenous knowledge is rarely integrated into scientific research in Amazonia. He warns that data and technology often shape – and limit – how the forest is perceived.

One of your points is that the Amazon forest is shaped by how we define it. Can you explain?

Yes, it sounds like a technicality, but we often underestimate its importance. Environment is always political - everyone from activists to politicians relies on data – often provided by the government - and when it comes to a forest like the Amazon, definitions shape what gets protected, what gets funded, what gets erased. When we say “the forest,” we’re really talking about a decision: who gets to speak for it—and who doesn’t. Brazil follows the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s definition*, where the most recent defines a forest as an area where trees are expected to grow taller than five meters within five years. In other words, you can cut down everything and still call it a forest, if you expect the trees to grow back. The reason is that the forest is mostly defined by what satellites can see. So what counts as forest is not related only to how humans perceive it, but also to what a satellite can collect. This obviously affects legislation, preservation goals, and even international climate funding.

But isn’t science supposed to give us the real picture of the forest?

That’s the promise—but we need to ask: whose picture? Scientific models are incredibly advanced, but they’re also incredibly narrow. This also means that they often erase the people who live in and shape the forest. Indigenous communities, for example, have been managing biodiversity for centuries—yet in most models, they don’t exist. One study on carbon content in the Amazon examined an area with 100 different kinds of trees but claimed that only two were actually useful to local communities. However, when researchers spoke directly with those communities, they found that over 60 species were used for rituals, medicine, food, and aesthetics—none of which had been accounted for. Unfortunately, often science doesn’t even think of including local communities.

Can you give a current example of how scientific models overlook local knowledge in the Amazon?

Let’s take a look at AmazonFACE. This is one of the most ambitious climate experiments ever done in the Amazon. FACE stands for Free-Air CO₂ Enrichment, and I’ve been following the involved scientists to understand how they view the forest. Here, researchers are building a kind of metal skeleton in the forest—30-meter towers that will pump extra carbon dioxide into the air to simulate the atmosphere of 30, 50, 70 years from now. The goal is to see how the forest responds before the climate actually changes that much. Will it absorb more CO₂? Stop growing? Die and turn into savannah? It’s like a time machine for ecosystems—but one that runs on computers, sensors, and a very specific idea of what the forest is: plants and animals. But people and their culture, history, and knowledge play very small parts in the experiment, even though they’ve been there for thousands of years. Archeological research by Eduardo Nevesand Michael Heckenberger have shown that the incredible diversity of the Amazon Forest is not due to its untouched nature. On the contrary, the forest we have today and its capacity to withstand change is the result of thousands of years of local stewardship. Indigenous peoples and ribeirinhos are among the most knowledgeable stewards of the forest, and today, Indigenous territories in Brazil are where deforestation is most effectively controlled. Yet, their knowledge does not play a significant role in this kind of scientific experiment.

But despite these limitations, don’t we need technology to protect the Amazon?

Yes, absolutely. Technology is essential. Without satellites, remote sensors, or modeling software, we wouldn’t even be able to detect what’s happening in the forest. These tools allow us to frame problems differently. They give governments reports, help create climate policy, and can even support conservation. But they also shape what we think the forest is, so we need to think critically about them. They decide what gets seen, what gets left out - like the Brazilian savannah, the Cerrado, which is important for the same reasons as the Amazon but receive far less conservation attention. It is being deforested almost in silence. And modeling the Amazon as a giant carbon sink may be scientifically useful—but it’s also a simplification. And simplifications have consequences. What if the forest matters for reasons that can’t be captured in climate metrics? What if the people who live there see it differently? Technology doesn’t just answer questions—it decides which questions get asked in the first place.

What are your expectations for the forthcoming COP30?

I think the global climate governance model that powers COP and UNFCCC is showing its limits. Most CO2 reduction goals have not been met, and we are already surpassing the 1.5º global temperature increase limit. The withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement and the current shift away from globalization also weakens the global governance model. I hope that this COP can leverage the expected public participation to foster alternative governance models. Specifically for the Amazon Region, I hope that COP30 shows that the region has what is needed to lead the way into a greener economy, and that this empowers the local environmental leaders even more, since their work is critical to our collective future and they are in constant danger.

About
Felipe Mammoli is an interdisciplinary researcher interested in the cultural and technical aspects of how digital technologies are used to understand environmental issues, particularly climate change. He has a background in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Policy. He currently works as a research specialist focusing on creative visualization and sonification of socio-environmental data.

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*UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s definition of a forest

Land spanning more than 0.5 hectares with trees higher than 5 meters and a canopy cover of more than 10 percent, or trees able to reach these thresholds in situ. It does not include land that is predominantly under agricultural or urban land use. [...] Includes areas with young trees that have not yet reached but which are expected to reach a canopy cover of 10 percent and tree height of 5 meters. It also includes areas that are temporarily unstocked due to clear-cutting as part of a forest management practice or natural disasters, and which are expected to be regenerated within 5 years. Local conditions may, in exceptional cases, justify that a longer time frame is used. (FAO, 2023, p. 7)

 

Fact box: The changing definition of a forest
In medieval England, a forest was legally defined as a place where the king could hunt. After the Second World War, the definition was related to the need for wood and the rebuilding of Europe. Then, from the 1960s onward, satellites started shaping how we define forests—but this was limited by poor-quality images. If the resolution only allows you to zoom in to 5 square kilometers, then you need to define a forest accordingly. And though we’ve since the 1990s seen complex simulations and computer models, many places—like the Amazon—still rely on satellite images.