
Eduardo S. BrondízioIndiana University Bloomington | IUB · Department of Anthropology
Eduardo S. Brondízio
PhD
About
283
Publications
227,573
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
26,293
Citations
Introduction
Eduardo S. Brondízio-Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Dept. of Anthropology, Indiana University-Bloomington, Directs the Center for the Analysis of Social Ecological Landscapes, Senior Research Fellow at the Ostrom Workshop. External Prof. Environment & Society program (UNICAMP-Brazil). Int'l Member French Academy Agriculture, Elected Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the United States National Academy of Sciences. Laureate of the 2023 Volvo Environmental Prize.
Publications
Publications (283)
Finding pathways to more sustainable agriculture and resource use remains the most pressing challenge for Amazonian countries. Characterizing recent changes in the structure and types of agrarian production systems, this review identifies responses to deal with the challenges and opportunities to promote more sustainable production and extraction e...
Current social-technical and political conditions threaten the integrity of the Amazon biome. Overcoming these lock-ins requires structural transformations away from conventional economies towards 'socio-bioeconomies' (SBEs). SBEs are economies based on the sustainable use and restoration of Amazonian ecosystems, as well as Indigenous and rural liv...
Community-based conservation has gained traction in the Brazilian Amazon due to its potential in combining territorial protection, local well-being, and biodiversity conservation. Here, we conducted an innovative assessment of the effective protection footprint of the largest community-based fisheries conservation arrangement in the Amazon. Local c...
Indigenous and traditional practices based on ethnoecological knowledge are fundamental to biodiversity stewardship and sustainable use.
Knowledge partnerships between Indigenous Peoples, traditional local communities, and ecologists can produce richer and fairer understandings of nature.
We identify key topical areas where such collaborations can...
Halting the loss of jobs and knowledge from small-scale
producers requires investing in rural sustainability, addressing poverty and inequity and ensuring the economic gains stay local. The benefits would be shared globally.
The Amazon has a diverse array of social and environmental initiatives that adopt forest-based land-use practices to promote rural development and support local livelihoods. However, they are often insufficiently recognized as transformative pathways to sustainability and the factors that explain their success remain understudied. To address this g...
Recently two distinctly different conceptualisations of insurance value of biodiversity/ ecosystems have been developed. The ecosystem framing addresses the full resilience value without singling out subjective risk preferences. Conversely, the economic framing focuses exactly on this subjective value of risk aversion, implying that the insurance v...
Working paper analysing the economic implications of the proposed 30% target for
areal protection in the draft post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework
This article reviews the history of the Brazilian legislation on forests since the 16th Century and examines how narratives and values have evolved through time.
[Portuguese] O artigo apresenta os métodos empregados para coleta e análise de dados a partir da revisão e exame de documentos e leis florestais de diferentes perío- dos históricos. Resum...
The Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) was established in 2011, and is now one of the major international social-ecological systems (SES) research networks. During this time, SES research has undergone a phase of rapid growth and has grown into an influential branch of sustainability science. In this Perspective, we argue that SES res...
Morel, H., W. Megarry, A. Potts, Y. Arikan, E. Brondizio, M. Cassar, G. Flato, J. Hosagrahar, R. Jigyasu, V. Mason-Delmotte, H. Oumarou Ibrahim, H. Pörtner, D.C. Roberts, S. Sengupta, P. Dolma Sherpa, R. Veillon, S. Forgesson, 2022. Global Research and Action Agenda on Culture, Heritage and Climate Change. ICSM CHC, Paris
At the peak of Amazonian deforestation in the mid-2000s, a suite of initiatives to curb deforestation was implemented, narrowing their scopes to particular agents, critical municipalities, and economic activities and supply chains. The List of Priority Municipalities (LPM) launched in 2008 became a central tenet of these efforts. It requires local...
This Report provides a comprehensive, objective, open, transparent, systematic, and rigorous scientific assessment of the state of the Amazon’s ecosystems, current trends, and their implications for the long-term well-being of the region, as well as opportunities and policy relevant options for conservation and sustainable development.
This Report provides a comprehensive, objective, open, transparent, systematic, and rigorous scientific assessment of the state of the Amazon’s ecosystems, current trends, and their implications for the long-term well-being of the region, as well as opportunities and policy relevant options for conservation and sustainable development.
This article introduces a special issue on the contribution of social science to addressing transformations to sustainability. Articles underline the importance of embracing theoretically rooted, empirically informed, and collaboratively generated knowledge to address sustainability challenges and transformative change. Emphasis is placed on the ro...
Scientific research that purports to evaluate Indigenous fire regimes in the absence of ethnographically contextualized ecological data runs the risk of exacerbating the fire blame game and providing evidence to support distorted narratives advanced by anti-Indigenous advocates. Spatial analysis of fire scars in Indigenous territories can be an eff...
A virtual special issue celebrating 30 years of the journal Global Environmental Change: Human and Policy Dimensions. The special issue includes 10 original articles with updated commentaries by authors
Infrastructure systems have direct implications for how health and well-being evolve across urban–rural systems. Scientists, practitioners, and policy-makers use domain-specific methods and tools to characterize sectors of infrastructure, but these approaches do not capture the cascading effects across interrelated infrastructure and governance dom...
Este artigo discute a interveniência da sociedade civil na prevenção de riscos hidro-climáticos na Amazônia sul-ocidental, a partir de uma abordagem neo-sistêmica, no Acre, que tem sido palco de enchentes e de incêndios recorrentes e vem se adaptando a este cenário através de uma estrutura de prevenção. De natureza qualitativa e exploratória, este...
Finding pathways to more sustainable agriculture and resource use remains the most pressing challenge for Amazonian countries today. This chapter focuses on characterizing recent changes in the structure and types of agrarian production systems, including fisheries. The chapter identifies local responses to deal with both the challenges and opportu...
This chapter reviews the often-invisible, powerful processes that drive social and ecological change in the Amazon, and the diverse peoples who inhabit its landscapes. It explores the large-scale development ide- ologies of modernization, and the policy tools that were deployed to carry them out. Outlining general pe- riods of macro policy shifts,...
The knowledge, values, and practices of Indigenous peoples and local communities offer ways to understand and better address social-environmental problems. The article reviews the state of the literature on this topic by focusing on six pathways by which Indigenous peoples and local communities engage with management of and relationships to nature....
By the 1980s, the Brazilian Amazon was already an urbanized forest. A large portion of its population was living in non-rural areas attracted by better service provisioning and economic opportunities in fast-developing urban centers. Located at the Amazon Estuary-Delta, Belém is the Amazon’s largest metropolitan area, marked by informal urban expan...
Eduardo Brondizio draws on his experience with international efforts to address climate change in locating Performing Environmentalisms as a timely contribution to a holistic approach to environmental issues. Brondizio discovers in the essays in this book ample promise for a more inclusive, and effective, approach to this defining moment in the Ant...
Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change is a fresh contribution to the environmental humanities, offering ten original essays anchored in the fields of folklore studies and ethnomusicology that engage productively with forms of traditional expressive culture at the crux of environmental debate and conflict. These essa...
The knowledge systems and practices of Indigenous Peoples and local communities play critical roles in safeguarding the biological and cultural diversity of our planet. Globalization, government policies, capitalism, colonialism, and other rapid social-ecological changes threaten the relationships between Indigenous Peoples and local communities an...
Uma Agricultura Amazônica: Sem o conhecimento do agricultor ribeirinho não haveria expansão global da economia do Açaí. In Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Sônia Barbosa Magalhães e Cristina Adams (organizadoras); Laure Emperaire (coordenadora da seção 7). Povos tradicionais e biodiversidade no Brasil [recurso eletrônico] : contribuições dos povos indíge...
The Convention on Biological Diversity is defining the goals that will frame future global biodiversity policy in a context of rapid biodiversity decline and under pressure to make transformative change. Drawing on the work of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, we argue that transformative change requires the foregrounding of Indigenous people...
The Amazon River delta may be currently characterized biophysically as a relatively preserved delta compared to the rampant vulnerability of many of the world’s large deltas. This status of relative preservation is reflected in a number of criteria: The still largely free-flowing nature of many of the rivers and the main stem of the Amazon that fee...
From state-based developmentalism to community-based initiatives to market-based conservation, the Brazilian Amazon has been a laboratory of development interventions for over 50 years. The region is now confronting a devastating COVID-19 pandemic amid renewed environmental pressures and increasing social inequities. While these forces are shaping...
Key insights on needs in urban regional governance - Global urbanization (the increasing concentration in urban settlements of the increasing world population), is a driver and accelerator of shifts in diversity, new cross-scale interactions, decoupling from ecological processes, increasing risk and exposure to shocks. Responding to the challenges...
This is a UNEP synthesis report of several global assessment, providing a blueprint for tackling the climatic , biodiversity and pollution emergencies.
National policies face the challenge of being relevant and enforceable to diverse groups of agents and context-specific realities. At the peak of Amazonian deforestation in the mid-2000s, a suite of initiatives aiming at reducing forest loss was implemented, narrowing their scopes to particular agents, critical municipalities, and economic activiti...
Indigenous Peoples’ lands cover over one‐quarter of Earth's surface, a significant proportion of which is still free from industrial‐level human impacts. As a result, Indigenous Peoples and their lands are crucial for the long‐term persistence of Earth's biodiversity and ecosystem services. Yet, information on species composition on these lands glo...
A leading edge facet of the transition to sustainability is the development, implementation and extended use of new technologies and related system innovations. The two open issues, volumes 45 and 49, of Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability journal, are focused on a set of review pieces that evaluate a broad range of these emerging techn...
Including local and indigenous knowledge in the work of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Global Assessment: Outcomes and lessons for the future.
Aim
Tree crowns determine light interception, carbon and water exchange. Thus, understanding the factors causing tree crown allometry to vary at the tree and stand level matters greatly for the development of future vegetation modelling and for the calibration of remote sensing products. Nevertheless, we know little about large‐scale variation and...
Aim: Tree crowns determine light interception, carbon and water exchange. Thus, understanding the factors causing tree crown allometry to vary at the tree and stand level matters greatly for the development of future vegetation modelling and for the calibration of remote sensing products. Nevertheless, we know little about large‐scale variation and...
Brazilian small-scale farmers are seeking new types of collaborations and economic opportunities amid a changing world. Market opportunities, however, have incurred demanding environmental, financial and labor requirements, and created trade-offs between expanding cash crops and maintaining livelihood security. We analyze the Tomé-Açu region in the...
Earth’s ecosystems, upon which all life depends, are in a severe state of degradation. The upcoming UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration aims to “prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems on every continent and in every ocean.” These Voices articulate why and what action is urgently needed.
Are superfoods just a marketing device, another label meant to attract the eye? Or do superfoods tell us a deeper story about how food and health relate in a global marketplace full of anonymous commodities?
In the past decade, superfoods have taken US and European grocery stores by storm. Novel commodities like quinoa and moringa, along with famil...
Globally, rising seas, coastal erosion, extended dry periods, and flooding contribute to decreased water security and increased disaster incidence. Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) are increasingly advanced as innovative responses to promote adaptation and build resilience, and they are arguably more sustainable than traditional gray infrastructure. Th...
Common approaches to reverse the trend of tropical deforestation and loss of wildlife include systems of protected areas (PAs) such as national parks, payments for ecosystem services programs (PES) that provide financial reward to landowners protecting their forests, and ecotourism that attempts to increase local economic gains and protect biodiver...
Climate change is intensifying tropical cyclones, accelerating sea-level rise, and increasing coastal flooding. River deltas are especially vulnerable to flooding because of their low elevations and densely populated cities. Yet, we do not know how many people live on deltas and their exposure to flooding. Using a new global dataset, we show that 3...
Las iniciativas de la restauración del paisaje forestal pueden verse obstaculizadas por falta de comunicación o tal vez por la superposición entre sectores, políticas no alineadas con un objetivo común y por desbalances de información y poder tanto al interior como entre diferentes niveles de gobierno. Es necesario enfocarse en cómo funcionan los a...
Indigenous territories represent ~45% of land categorized as wilderness in the Amazon, but account for <15% of all forest loss on this land. At a time when the Amazon faces unprecedented pressures, overcoming polarization and aligning the goals of wilderness defenders and Indigenous peoples is paramount, to avoid environmental degradation.
There have been calls for greater inclusion of Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) in applied ecosystems research and ecological assessments. The Intergovernmental Science‐Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Global Assessment (GA) is the first global scale assessment to systematically engage with ILK and issues of concer...
Humanity is on a deeply unsustainable trajectory. We are exceeding planetary boundaries and unlikely to meet many international sustainable development goals and global environmental targets. Until recently, there was no broadly accepted framework of interventions that could ignite the transformations needed to achieve these desired targets and goa...
Governance arrangements directly influence decision making processes and the degree to which different stakeholder
groups are engaged in planning, implementing, and receiving benefits from Forest and Landscape
Restoration (FLR). Narrow institutional and agency mandates must be better aligned to permit new ways of
governing landscapes that are cente...
The COVID-19 crisis is not a new issue. Conditions leading to it have been taking shape for decades. This pandemic is rather a symptom of much deeper challenges resulting from contemporary production and consumption structures, social inequalities, nature deterioration, and global connectivity. To think about the post-pandemic world is to envision...
Gold mining has rapidly increased across the Amazon Basin in recent years, especially in the Guiana shield, where it is responsible for >90% of total deforestation. However, the ability of forests to recover from gold mining activities remains largely unquantified.
Forest inventory plots were installed on recently abandoned mines in two major minin...
Collective action problems are linked together when the outcomes of one collective action situation affect the working components of another. In San Diego, California, solutions to the collective action dilemmas of water provisioning, conservation, and wastewater were found to have influenced each other between 1990 and 2010. Building upon a databa...
It is no longer possible nor desirable to address the dual challenges of equity and sustainability separately. Instead, they require new thinking and approaches which recognize their interlinkages, as well as the multiple perspectives and dimensions involved. We illustrate how equity and sustainability are intertwined, and how a complex social–ecol...
We investigated the importance assigned to forest extractive resources (FR) for subsistence and income generation by colonist and Caboclos populations in the Brazilian Amazon. Key informants in 114 settlements (82 Caboclos and 32 colonists) in the southwest region of Pará classified on a four-level ordinal scale the importance of fruits, medicinal...
Intact Forest Landscapes (IFLs) are critical strongholds for the environmental services that they provide, not least for their role in climate protection. On the basis of information about the distributions of IFLs and Indigenous Peoples’ lands, we examined the importance of these areas for conserving the world's remaining intact forests. We determ...
The time is now
For decades, scientists have been raising calls for societal changes that will reduce our impacts on nature. Though much conservation has occurred, our natural environment continues to decline under the weight of our consumption. Humanity depends directly on the output of nature; thus, this decline will affect us, just as it does th...
Indigenous Peoples’ lands cover over one-quarter of the Earth’s surface, a significant proportion of which is still free from industrial-level human impacts. As a result, Indigenous Peoples’ lands are crucial for the long-term persistence of Earth’s biodiversity and ecosystem services. Yet, information on species composition within Indigenous Peopl...
Indigenous peoples (IPs) worldwide are confronted by the increasing threat of pollution. Based on a comprehensive review of the literature (n = 686 studies), we present the current state of knowledge on: 1) the exposure and vulnerability of IPs to pollution; 2) the environmental, health, and cultural impacts of pollution upon IPs; and 3) IPs' contr...
Nutrition transition theory describes a progressive substitution of local staples for industrialized processed foods in local diets, a process documented diversely across world regions, and increasingly observed in rural areas of the global south. Here we examine the role of conditional cash transfer programs, in particular the emblematic Brazilian...
Although health, development, and environment challenges are interconnected, evidence remains fractured across sectors due to methodological and conceptual differences in research and practice. Aligned methods are needed to support Sustainable Development Goal advances and similar agendas. The Bridge Collaborative, an emergent research-practice col...
Scientific Framework to Save the Amazon
By
Scientists of the Amazon Countries and Global Partners
September 30, 2019
We, the scientists who study and monitor the Amazon rainforest, appeal to the reason and conscience of humankind. The Amazon, the largest rainforest in the world, is at great risk of destruction, and with it the well-being of our ge...
Although health, development, and environment challenges are interconnected, evidence remains fractured across sectors due to methodological and conceptual differences in research and practice. Aligned methods are needed to support Sustainable Development Goal advances and similar agendas. The Bridge Collaborative, an emergent research-practice col...
Although health, development, and environment challenges are interconnected, evidence remains fractured across sectors due to methodological and conceptual differences in research and practice. Aligned methods are needed to support Sustainable Development Goal advances and similar agendas. The Bridge Collaborative, an emergent research-practice col...