When Chief Raoni Metuktire was a young man, the Amazon rainforest was a different place.
"Nature was all around us,” says the Indigenous Brazilian leader and environmentalist. "There were many animals. We could make long trips, travel across the land. There wasn’t anything stopping us. The forest was big.”
Over half a century later, a fifth of that forest has been lost. Areas that were once remote and unspoiled are now cut through with roads and farms, and the land Raoni’s people occupy is much smaller. Since NASA started tracking the Amazon with satellites in 1972, there has been a "radical transformation across the southern and eastern frontiers,” says Douglas C. Morton, an Earth system scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. "People are no longer clearing 10 hectares at a time. People are clearing 10,000 hectares in a weekend with tractors.”
The Amazon’s plight set the tone for Raoni’s remarkable life, which has taken him out of Brazil’s central Mato Grosso state and all over the world to meet presidents, celebrities and business leaders. Raoni worked with Juscelino Kubitschek, Brazilian president in the late 1950s, and he was the subject of a 1978 documentary narrated by Marlon Brando. In 1989, he mounted a global campaign against deforestation with the pop star Sting, which drew attention to the cause and prompted the Brazilian government to recognize the Menkragnoti Indigenous Territory — millions of hectares of rainforest that includes Raoni’s home.
Now in his 90s, Raoni is still traveling the world, including a sojourn to the Bloomberg office in London for an interview, during which he was flanked by family members and associates who translated the discussion to and from his native language.
Raoni wears a headdress and an ornamental disk in his lip — cutting a striking figure amid the suits and concrete of London’s Square Mile.
Long ignored or persecuted, Indigenous people are increasingly involved in global discussions about the Amazon, where roughly 1.5 million of them live. The world’s forests have also risen to the top of the climate agenda. In 2022, 195 nations agreed to protect and restore at least 30% of the Earth’s land and water by 2030. Deforestation is expected to be a major topic at next year’s COP30 climate summit organized by the United Nations in Brazil.
With that attention — and more public awareness — has come some progress. Around 2005, the pace of deforestation in the Amazon slowed from roughly 20,000 square kilometers per year to 5,000 square kilometers. It rose again during Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency between 2019 and 2022, but dropped to less than 10,000 square kilometers in 2023 as Bolsonaro’s successor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, bolstered enforcement.
"I’d like to think that we’re heading in the right direction on a long term,” says Michael T. Coe, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center.
But the threat to the rainforest is also being exacerbated by a warming world. Through a combination of deforestation, land use change and climate change, the southern Amazon is today 1 to 2 degrees Celsius hotter than it was 40 years ago, according to Coe. Roughly 5% of the Amazon is no longer suitable for rainforest at all, and is turning into other landscapes such as savannah or drier forests. "The ideal climate for rainforest is shrinking,” Coe says.
"I want the forest to be preserved to lessen the heat on the Earth (and so) we have good air to breathe,” Raoni says. "We need shade. This is what I have been saying but nobody listens to me and they have deforested forests all around our lands.”
If current trends continue, another 590,000 square kilometers of the Amazon — an area larger than France — will be lost by 2050, according to the World Resources Institute. That would also leave the forest producing greenhouse gas emissions five times higher than the levels set out in Brazil’s climate goals.
Those impacts are felt disproportionately by Indigenous people, who depend on the ecosystems damaged by deforestation and don’t benefit from its economic activity. "The wealth is not shared locally. The Amazon region is among the poorest and most underserved areas in Brazil,” says WRI Brasil Executive Director Cristiane Fontes.
A healthy rainforest evaporates a massive amount of water, which adds cooling and irrigation to much of the Americas. It also acts as a giant carbon sink, slowing the rate of global warming. Losing that would have huge consequences for global weather patterns and would make reaching climate goals impossible. "It’s not just the Paris Agreement that is threatened by the degradation of rainforests like the Amazon,” Fontes says. "It’s human life.”
There is evidence that Indigenous people are successfully protecting some of the most carbon-rich parts of the Amazon, shielding the land from development and keeping out intruders. But Raoni says he has noticed droughts, high temperatures and changes to rainfall patterns. "The banks in your country here must stop sending money to Brazil, investing in deforestation,” he says. "We must talk together and take care of what’s left of the forest not just for our sake but for white people and everyone.”
Even as he approaches 100, Raoni doesn’t blink at traveling thousands of kilometers to fight for his homeland. He traces his skill with advocacy back to the 1950s, when Raoni was in his early 20s and first met someone outside of his community. The Villas Boas brothers, Brazilian activists and advocates for the country’s Indigenous people, came to his village and they quickly bonded.
Claudio Villas Boas was "the man that really taught me about white people and the way they think,” Raoni says. "So now I can defend the forest and act like I do.”
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