The first time Virgilio Viana saw the Amazon, he was a 16-year-old traveling with two school friends, moving along dirt roads, then continuing by boat as the forest rose around them. The trip set something in motion. It stayed with him through a forestry degree, a PhD on the region, and later a professorship in São Paulo that he eventually left for the more complicated work of trying to help govern the forest itself.
As State Secretary for Environment and Sustainable Development in Amazonas, Viana found himself in the thicket of politics, land disputes and the slow work of explaining why conservation matters to people who already live inside the ecosystem outsiders imagine as empty green. It was during this period that he coined a phrase now repeated across Brazil: the forest must be worth more standing than cut. An economist’s idea, reduced to the kind of line that spreads because people recognize something true in it.
Today he leads the Foundation for Amazon Sustainability (FAS), built around a principle that sounds obvious but was long resisted by some big conservation organizations: local people first. Much of what remains standing in the Amazon is there because Indigenous peoples and local communities have protected it. Caboclos, quilombolas, riverine families—they are the center of Viana’s argument that conservation without them will fail.
In a recent exchange, he spoke bluntly about the risks ahead. Some parts of the region, he says, have already passed a tipping point. Glaciers in the headwaters have melted beyond return. Southern forests are shifting under longer, harsher dry seasons. Fires, intensified by heat and drought, threaten to reshape entire landscapes. And alongside the ecological stress sits another force: organized crime, now powerful enough in some areas to undermine basic governance.
Still, Viana resists fatalism. His preferred metaphor is rowing: everyone, whether in government, civil society or local communities, picking up an oar and moving in the same direction. The ship is taking on water, he says, but not yet lost.
To spark that collective motion, FAS launched its “Hope Boat,” which carried more than 200 grassroots leaders, scientists and artists toward Belém during COP30. From over 600 community workshops emerged 99 adaptation plans—some small, some ambitious—representing an attempt to advance climate justice from the ground up. The sum required, he estimates, is around 4 billion dollars.
When he looks ahead 20 years, Viana imagines an Amazon with zero deforestation, restored landscapes, stronger local governance and a global community willing to back proven solutions. Not guaranteed. But still within reach.
