Large-Scale Collective Action to Avoid an Amazon Tipping Point – Key Actors and Interventions

Abstract

The destruction of the Amazon is a major global environmental issue, not only because of greenhouse gas emissions or direct impacts on biodiversity and livelihoods, but also due to the forest’s role as a tipping element of the Earth System. It means that after crossing a biophysical threshold, currently estimated to be when approximately 25% of the Amazon forest cover has been lost (thus only 5% more than the current state), a dieback process will be triggered and transform much of the rainforest into a drier ecosystem, with climatic implications across the globe. There is a large body of literature on the underlying drivers of Amazon deforestation, showing complex interlinkages between natural and social processes. However, insufficient attention has been paid to the behavioral and institutional microfoundations of change. Fundamental issues concerning cooperation, or even coordination, as well as the mechanisms facilitating or hampering such actions, can play a much more central role in attempts to unravel and address Amazon deforestation. We thus present the issue of preventing the Amazon biome from crossing a tipping point as a large-scale collective action problem. Drawing from collective action theory, we apply a novel analytical framework to shed light on the challenges of Amazon conservation, identifying key stressors and facilitators for successful collective action. We examine the problem of Amazon deforestation in relation to six key variables: information, accountability, harmony of interests, horizontal trust, knowledge about consequences, and sense of responsibility. An assessment of the state-of-the-art literature on Amazon land use through our heuristic lens shows that, while growing transparency has made information availability a collective action facilitator, lack of accountability, distrust among actors, and little sense of responsibility for halting deforestation, remain key stressors. We finalize by discussing numerous (third-party) interventions that can help break the gridlock and ignite successful collective action.

Keywords: Amazon, tipping point, deforestation, large-scale collective action, intervention, conservation policy