In Panama’s Darién, Indigenous communities test a new way to fund conservation

Faced with encroachment from illegal loggers and expanding agricultural frontiers, four Wounaan and Emberá-Wounaan villages in Panama's Darién forest conducted extensive biodiversity monitoring across 18,000 hectares of rainforest. Using Indigenous science alongside camera trapping, the initiative documented over 200 species, including endangered jaguars, Baird's tapirs, and crested eagles. The communities intend to leverage this ecological data to sell biodiversity credits, establishing a sustainable economic mechanism to fund forest preservation on ancestral lands lacking secure legal tenure.