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The Brazilian Amazon forest has been the target of constant attacks and has suffered economic pressure to exploit its natural resources. These attacks involve the illegal exploitation of fishing, wood, and mineral resources, which contribute to the impoverishment of the living conditions of the populations that do the most to preserve the Brazilian Amazon forest: traditional communities, Indigenous peoples and others.

The Javari Valley, one of the largest Indigenous territories in Brazil, is home to the most significant number of isolated Indigenous peoples worldwide. This territory is threatened from all sides: illegal fishers, loggers, miners, and international drug trafficking. Currently, in the region, the violence associated with the invasion of traditional lands for drug trafficking, illegal mining, and irregular trade in wood is advancing uncontrollably.

The National Indian Foundation of Brazil (FUNAI) is supposed to protect the Indigenous peoples, but funding cuts to FUNAI under Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's administration have contributed to the proliferation of illegal activities in Amazonian lands. Repression against freedom of expression, the exercise of journalism, and the unpunished threat against the life and actions of public servants, journalists, defenders of the environment and human rights are also advancing all over Brazil. Earlier this month, Brazilian activist Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Philips went missing and were subsequently found shot dead in the Javari Valley after the two men left on a research trip for a book Phillips was writing about conservation in the Amazon.

With the eyes of the world once again turned to the Brazilian Amazon forest, Â鶹´«Ã½ University's Faculty of Social Science and Humanities (FSSH) is investigating how to improve living conditions of rural populations and traditional communities engaged in natural resource conservation. Researchers Dr. Timothy MacNeill, Senior Teaching Professor, FSSH, and post-doctoral researcher Clarisse Machado, a former colleague of Bruno Pereira, are specifically looking at the Bolsa Verde Program. This program benefited 76,000 families distributed throughout the Brazilian territory by emphasizing the Amazon rainforest region and encouraging the served families to develop sustainable practices and conserve local ecosystems. Operating from 2011 to 2017, the program was an important social policy that helped combat family impoverishment and the violence that accompanies it.

For the project, entitled Traditional Peoples' Perspectives on Environmental Conservation: The Experience of Bolsa Verde in Brazil, the researchers are interviewing former managers and beneficiaries of the program to understand to what extent the payment for environmental services, focused on family units, can contribute to or interfere with the collective activities of ecosystem conservation that are already customarily carried out by these traditional communities. The research also seeks to contradict the idea that poor and vulnerable communities cannot manage their resources with environmental intelligence: a type of racism that still occurs when applying resources earmarked for vulnerable populations.