After years of resisting mining, logging, and cattle ranching on their land, four Indigenous nationalities in eastern Ecuador have secured legal recognition of a reserve covering more than 3 million acres of Amazon rainforest. The Tarímiat Pujutaí Nuṉka Reserve — established on February 1, 2023 C.E. — is now one of the largest protected areas in the region, and it was built from the ground up by the communities it protects.
At a glance
- Amazon reserve: The Tarímiat Pujutaí Nuṉka Reserve covers 1,237,395 hectares (roughly 3.06 million acres) of Andean and Amazonian forests in Ecuador’s Morona Santiago province.
- Indigenous land protection: Four nationalities — the Shuar and Achuar peoples, represented by FICSH, NASHE, NAE, and PSHA — led a campaign that began in November 2021 C.E. and culminated in a formal provincial agreement.
- Wildlife corridor: The reserve connects to other protected areas in eastern Ecuador and northern Peru, forming a corridor for jaguars (Panthera onca), tapirs (Tapirus terrestris), spectacled bears (Tremarctos ornatus), and more than a thousand bird species.
What the land holds
Morona Santiago province is ecologically extraordinary. Cloud forests give way to sandstone plateaus, which open into Amazonian lowlands and floodplain forests. The area supports over a thousand bird species, dozens of them found nowhere else on Earth.
For the nearly 200,000 people who live there — most of them members of Shuar and Achuar communities including Taisha, Morona, Sucúa, Logroño, Méndez, Tiwintza, Limón Indanza, San Juan Bosco, and Gualaquiza — the forest is not a resource to be extracted. It is home.
“Together as Shuar, Achuar and mestizos, let us conserve our life, expressed in the rainforest, rivers and the weather, with the science and action on which we all depend,” said Rafael Antuni, Governor of Morona Santiago.
A region under pressure
The recognition comes none too soon. Morona Santiago has some of the highest deforestation rates in Ecuador, losing around 89,000 hectares (about 220,000 acres) of forest cover each year, according to the Andes Amazon Fund. Mining, commercial logging, and cattle ranching have all pushed into the province in recent decades.
That pressure is what drove the four Indigenous organizations to act. In November 2021 C.E., they signed a formal agreement with the Morona Santiago provincial government to pursue protected status — a process that took more than a year and involved the entire community.
Built on 900 voices
What makes this reserve unusual, even by Ecuador’s standards, is how it was designed. The NGO Nature and Culture International supported a “pre-legislative consultation process” that included 21 separate meetings with the four nationalities — drawing participation from nearly 900 residents — to understand their different visions for the land before a single boundary was drawn.
That kind of process is not the norm. Too often, conservation areas are mapped by outside agencies without meaningful input from the people who live inside them. Here, the communities shaped the reserve’s goals from the start: preservation of biodiversity, yes, but also sustainable development, subsistence, and the survival of cultural practices across generations.
“Tarímiat Pujutaí Nuṉka will aid in preserving the area’s cultural practices for present and future generations,” the Andes Amazon Fund said in its statement. “[It] will also promote sustainable development and subsistence.”
A corridor, not an island
The reserve’s design reflects hard-learned lessons in conservation biology. Isolated protected areas, however large, can function as ecological islands — populations shrink, gene pools narrow, species disappear. By connecting to existing protected areas in eastern Ecuador and northern Peru, Tarímiat Pujutaí Nuṉka becomes part of a larger system that gives wide-ranging animals like jaguars the room they need to survive.
The Andes Amazon Fund, which provided support for the reserve’s establishment, describes it as a critical link in that regional network.
What comes next
Recognition is the first step, not the last. Enforcement in remote Amazon provinces is consistently difficult, and the same economic pressures — mining concessions, cattle ranching expansion, illegal logging — that made the reserve necessary have not disappeared. Whether the provincial and national government will provide sustained resources to back the legal designation remains an open question.
Still, the communities have something concrete now that they did not have before: a legal instrument they helped create, covering more than 3 million acres, in their own language. Tarímiat Pujutaí Nuṉka translates roughly to “land where we live well” — and that, ultimately, is what this reserve is designed to protect.
“This is an initiative that will not only allow us to preserve, but also enjoy our forests and climate, to offer the world a healthy environment,” Governor Antuni said at the reserve’s recognition.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Mongabay
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Indigenous land rights reach the global stage at COP30
- Ghana protects a new marine area at Cape Three Points
- The Good News for Humankind archive on Ecuador
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