Dear Colleagues,

The Amazon region plays a crucial and controversial role in planetary sustainability. Wealth and waste are side by side. Amazon forests are repositories of the largest remaining biodiversity patrimonies on Earth, influences the precipitation patterns all over South America, and is among the ecosystems whose degradation will accelerate global warming. The aggressive deforestation and illegal land appropriation processes in the Brazilian Amazon are threatening such environmental heritage, but also wasting resources and failing to efficiently employ the region's impressive potential. Millions of hectares of degraded forests and landscapes are stretching across the region. Potentials are rarely realized, showing that development could follow more virtuous trajectories or even provide examples for the world, but without achieving them. Year after year the Amazon seems to miss opportunities, not only on farms and forests, but also in governance systems, both public and private. Science is highly solicited, and recently succeeds in developing multiple innovative approaches, especially around land use issues. New databases and analytical models, new diagnostic and prospective tools, new agricultural and forest management technologies, new methodologies for evaluation and monitoring, new concept to support commodity chains, governments, local institutions.

In this context of controversies where science has a role of understanding and guidance, this Special Issue welcomes cutting-edge research providing new insights on the following questions:

How can we understand and monitor better the diverse processes underlying the recent land use changes, such increase in deforestation and forest degradation in the region?

Which innovations could support institutions and local actors to consolidate sustainable development trajectories?

Dr. Poccard-Chapuis René
Guest Editor

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• deforestation
• Brazilian Amazon
• land change
• land tenure
• territorial planning
• scenarios
• greenhouse gas emissions
• biodiversity loss
• policies
• cattle ranching
• land grabbing