Global efforts to halt biodiversity loss and address climate change increasingly depend on scientific knowledge generated in the Amazon. The outcomes of COP30, hosted in Belém in November 2025, reaffirmed the centrality of Amazonian science to global environmental agendas, while also exposing persistent structural constraints that limit its effectiveness. Fragmented governance, short-term and externally controlled funding, and enduring inequities in leadership, data ownership, and decision-making continue to undermine the region’s capacity to deliver credible, policy-relevant, and socially legitimate science at scale. Here, we argue that incremental reforms are insufficient. We identify three interrelated bottlenecks: integration across initiatives, co-governance with local institutions and knowledge holders, and long-term funding stability, and propose a collaborative, polycentric framework to address them. We further argue that, without structural transformation, current investments risk reproducing existing asymmetries rather than enabling durable and territorially grounded conservation outcomes. We outline priority actions for governments, funders, and research networks to consolidate Amazon-based leadership and translate scientific investments into durable conservation and socio-ecological outcomes beyond COP30.
Rabelo et al. (Mon,) studied this question.