Dr. Stephan Schwartzman

Co-director, International Program, Environmental Defense Fund

Anthropologist Stephan Schwartzman lived with the Panará tribe in Mato Grosso, Brazil for a year and a half in the early 1980s and learned their unwritten language. He subsequently defended his PhD thesis on the group at the University of Chicago. Schwartzman worked closely with the emerging Amazon rubber tappers’ movement in the western Amazon starting in 1985, and accompanied rubber tapper leader Chico Mendes on his two trips to the United States, as well as conducting research on the rubber tappers’ alternative conservation and development proposal, the "extractive reserves" (protected areas inhabited and managed by traditional populations such as rubber tappers and Brazil nut gatherers). Since 1991, Schwartzman has worked with the Panará people, and NGO partner the Instituto Socioambiental, to help the Panará in their successful initiative to recover their traditional territory and ensure its legal recognition, physical demarcation and protection.

Since 2002, Schwartzman has worked with grassroots groups and NGOs toward the creation of a reserve mosaic in the Terra do Meio region of the Amazon state of Pará. Between November 2004 and July 2006 the Brazilian government, in response to civil society advocacy, created ~8 million ha. of new parks and extractive reserves in the lawless frontier region. This established a continuous corridor of indigenous lands and conservation units of 26 million ha. in the Xingu river basin, the largest tropical forest reserves corridor in the world. EDF works with a consortium of Brazilian NGOs, grassroots organizations and indigenous and traditional communities to implement and protect the reserves.

Schwartzman also leads EDF’s initiative to create large-scale incentives for tropical countries to reduce their deforestation through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and in the emerging US emissions control regime, with Brazilian and other international partners.