Forest Communities Are Showing What a Better Economy Looks Like

In Urucureá, a small riverside community in the Brazilian Amazon, the forest is inseparable from everyday life. Fibers cut from tucumã palms are woven into baskets, bags and other handicrafts. Cumaru trees provide fragrant seeds known as tonka beans, or Amazon vanilla, which are used in perfumes and other products, while copaíba trees are tapped for an oil made into cosmetics, soaps and traditional medicines. Residents also turn locally grown cassava into traditional foods such as tucupi, a tangy sauce common in their cuisine.

The relationship to the forest is at the heart of the Amazonian sociobioeconomy: an approach to economic life grounded in the interdependence of communities and living forests. For many Indigenous Peoples, that relationship is also ancestral and spiritual. Traditional knowledge, innovation and investment, passed down between generations, must sustain those bonds and enable people and forests to thrive together.

Last March, just months after the UN climate change summit (COP30) brought global climate discussions to Belém, Brazil, I visited Urucureá and met members of Turiarte, a cooperative that helps communities organize and market traditional handicrafts and community-based tourism. By working collectively, members can reach buyers and visitors while strengthening livelihoods rooted in their territories.

The learning journey, organized through the community-led forest economies movement, brought together Indigenous and community leaders, researchers and partners working in policy, finance and civil society, including from the Amazon, Congo Basin and Southeast Asia. We came to learn how these economies work, their relationship to protecting forests and biodiversity, and what’s needed to help these communities thrive.

Understanding Community-Led Forest Economies

Community-led forest economies are not new. They are economies rooted in particular territories and led, managed and governed primarily by Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples and local communities, where they weave together their lives, culture and ecological stewardship.

They encompass sustainable fisheries and farming, forest products and community-based tourism, alongside contributions that markets rarely reward, such as food security, biodiversity protection and knowledge sharing. Their strength comes from their ability to make collective decisions, maintain healthy ecosystems and adapt knowledge across generations.

These economies extend far beyond Brazil, where the concept of sociobioeconomy has been gaining traction. Related traditions include social forestry in Indonesia, community forestry in the Congo Basin and community forest enterprises in Mexico and Central America. The term “community-led forest economies” connects these experiences while respecting their distinct histories and ways of organizing.

A Power Shift That Enables Communities to Lead

One of the clearest lessons from our experience in the Brazilian Amazon was that strengthening community-led forest economies requires a shift in power.

For too long, Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples and local communities have been treated primarily as beneficiaries of conservation and development initiatives rather than as leaders, rights holders and economic actors in their own right. Throughout our journey, we saw communities governing territories, stewarding biocultural heritage by teaching crafting techniques, managing local businesses and sharing knowledge across generations.

Women and young people were central to the leadership we encountered. Turiarte, led by a young woman at the time of our visit, combines traditional craftsmanship and community tourism to help women turn their knowledge and skills into income and greater economic autonomy. At Amélias da Amazônia, a women-led enterprise in the Tapajós National Forest, women draw on ancestral knowledge to make beauty and food products from local forest resources.

Supporting these enterprises means investing in the people and collective institutions that sustain both livelihoods and forests. Globally, Indigenous Peoples and local communities hold or manage lands containing 54% of the world’s remaining intact forests, safeguarding them through customary governance, sustainable management, territorial patrols and monitoring of illegal activity. Research shows that these lands often support more species and experience lower rates of deforestation and degradation than lands managed by public or private entities and can achieve these conservation outcomes at lower cost.

Yet these communities often lack the political, economic, legal and social conditions needed to exercise full autonomy and self-determination. This can make it harder to defend their territories against illegal logging and mining, secure finance for their enterprises or negotiate fair prices for their products. Defending their lands can also put their lives at risk: Global Witness documented the killings of at least 124 land and environmental defenders worldwide in 2025, including 26 in Brazil. Communities are left bearing the costs and risks of protecting forests while too little of the value they create returns to support their livelihoods and well-being.

A power shift would mean recognizing Indigenous and traditional knowledge as a foundation for innovation, protecting communities’ rights to their lands and customary practices, and respecting free, prior and informed consent, or the right to say yes or no to proposals affecting their lands and resources, with full information, without pressure and before activities begin. It also means strengthening community governance institutions so that communities can shape their own future.

This kind of power shift also requires transforming systems beyond the community. Finance, markets, infrastructure, public policy and research have too often been designed around external priorities. These systems must recognize communities as equal partners, direct investment to locally defined priorities and reward their stewardship.

Creating the Conditions for Community Forest Economies to Thrive

The communities we visited demonstrated the strength of economies grounded in forest stewardship. They also showed us where support falls short. Governments, investors and partners can help create the conditions for these economies to thrive in several connected ways.

Financial incentives must reward forest stewardship. In 2023, an estimated $7.3 trillion flowed into activities that harm nature, compared with $220 billion invested in nature-based solutions, according to the UN Environment Programme’s State of Finance for Nature 2026 report. That is a ratio of more than 30-to-1. Redirecting harmful subsidies and investment toward forest protection and sustainable livelihoods would help address the imbalance that leaves community enterprises at a disadvantage.

Communities require direct and adequate finance. A 2025 analysis by Rainforest Foundation Norway and the Rights and Resources Initiative found that funding for Indigenous, local community and Afro-descendant tenure rights between 2011 and 2024 remained below 1% of climate-related aid and philanthropy. Much of that support still flows through international organizations and multilateral institutions. Community-led funds offer routes toward greater local control. Such efforts need long-term support, with funding that reflects community priorities and compensates the work of protecting territories.

Communities need secure rights to the forests they protect. At COP30, 15 governments, including Brazil, Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Germany and the United Kingdom, backed the Intergovernmental Land Tenure Commitment to recognize and strengthen rights across 160 million hectares by 2030. The complementary Forest and Land Tenure Pledge committed $1.8 billion from government and philanthropic funders. Delivering on these commitments requires legal recognition, enforcement and resources for communities to govern their territories.

Investment must strengthen community enterprises and essential infrastructure. The Bioeconomy Challenge, launched at COP30, seeks to translate global principles into action through work on finance, markets, impact metrics and community benefits. WRI coordinates the challenge’s workstream on sociobioeconomy, putting people at the center of this movement. Communities need public investment, working capital, reliable transportation, renewable energy, connectivity and access to healthcare. These investments support both viable enterprises and the well-being of the people protecting forests.

Communities must be able to shape markets and retain more value. Too often, producers have little choice but to accept prices set by buyers, while value accumulates farther along the supply chain. Cocoa illustrates the imbalance: Research highlighted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, using 2018 and 2020 data from the French and German chocolate markets, found that farmers received about 11% of the value of a chocolate bar, compared with a combined 70% for brands and retailers. Although these figures are not specific to Amazonian communities, they show why greater production alone does not guarantee a fairer return.

In Santarém, Brazil, for example, the Ecocentro da Sociobioeconomia brings together producers and their products in a single building for processing, transport and sale, which strengthens cooperatives and supports community-owned brands, helping them improve producers’ negotiating power. Public procurement, such as school lunch programs, can create more stable demand for locally produced foods. These kinds of programs allow investments in local and regional markets, alongside opportunities to reach international buyers.

Coordinating these efforts across sectors and borders is equally important. The Pan-Amazon Network for Bioeconomy, whose secretariat includes WRI, brings together Indigenous and community representatives, producers, researchers, financial institutions and civil society to advance a locally led bioeconomy across the Amazon. Its working groups connect efforts to improve access to finance and markets, strengthen public policies, build evidence and support local enterprises. By creating a shared agenda across these areas, the network seeks to align investment and policy with priorities emerging from the territories themselves, with Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples and local communities helping shape decisions and sharing fairly in the benefits.

Strengthening Existing Economies Across Regions

Across the world’s tropical forests, Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples and local communities already steward ecosystems vital to climate stability, biodiversity and human well-being. The task ahead is to strengthen that leadership and change the systems that constrain it.

This work must grow from each region’s own experience. Communities across Latin America, Africa and Asia have distinct legal systems, cultural traditions and priorities. Learning exchanges and cooperation can help identify which approaches to collective governance, enterprise development and direct finance are useful elsewhere, and how they must be adapted. The aim is to support locally rooted economies while communities learn from one another.

WRI and its community-led forest economies partners seek to support that exchange, advance a shared research and learning agenda, and connect community priorities with governments, funders and businesses able to act on them to achieve the power shift.

We invite community organizations, governments, researchers, funders and businesses to join the community-led forest economies movement and help shape this shared agenda.

When people thrive, forests thrive.