The Natural and Social History of the Indigenous Lands and Protected Areas Corridor of the Xingu River Basin and Prospects for Protection

The 280,000 km 2 of indigenous lands and protected areas (ILPAs) of the Xingu river basin form a continuous forest corridor inhabited by 25 indigenous peoples and about 185 riverine ( ribeirinho ) families. Spanning one of the world's most intense deforestation zones in Para and Mato Grosso states, the Xingu ILPAs exemplify how Brazilian government policy and indigenous and forest communities’ mobilization have worked to reduce Amazon deforestation rates. We find that projects of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and government support for indigenous and traditional communities have developed scalable resource management and income generation projects within the ILPAs. They have supported territorial surveillance and protection in the absence of government enforcement of protected areas including indigenous territories. Most importantly, NGOs have enabled local communities to organize and administer their own institutions—critical to building capacity to manage their territories. We find striking differences in the level of ecological intactness between large areas of forest controlled by indigenous communities that have allied with NGOs compared with the forest of those communities that do not receive NGO investment. Larger-scale sustainable sources of finance will be needed to address current threats and continuing lawlessness in the frontier region. Payment for ecosystem services, including Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD +), potentially including both public and private sources, could attain the scale needed.