A new paper co-authored by Dr. Pierrat — led by Gabriel de Oliveira and a consortium of 66 researchers across 57 institutions — is out now in Nature Sustainability. “Spiralling frontier threats in Indigenous Amazonia” documents how legally protected Indigenous Lands in the Brazilian Amazon are increasingly encircled by socio-environmental “frontiers” — illegal resource extraction, deforestation, and violence — even as the lands themselves remain comparatively intact. Using the Vale do Javari Indigenous Land in western Brazil, home to the world’s largest concentration of isolated Indigenous peoples, as a case study, the authors show how encroaching pressure at the margins of protected territory can undermine its integrity from the outside in.
The paper argues that protecting Indigenous Lands requires looking beyond their boundaries to the frontiers closing in around them, and calls for urgent, coordinated action to prevent irreversible harm to both people and forest.
de Oliveira, G., et al. (66 authors, including Pierrat, Z. A.), 2026. Spiralling frontier threats in Indigenous Amazonia. Nature Sustainability. doi.org/10.1038/s41893-026-01874-z