 the largest tropical forest in the world, the Amazon Rainforest Blankets more than 700 million hectares of South America. These forests team with plant and animal life, hosting an estimated 10% of the earth's known species. But the region is also home to more than 30 million people who live in remote communities, villages, towns and cities in nine countries across the Amazon Basin. And while the Amazon fulfills an important global role, regulating the climate and rainfall, conserving biodiversity and storing carbon, it is also a vital source of life for local people. Too often policy makers see the forest in the Amazon as an empty space, something that can be conserved. But it's a landscape filled with people, people that use the forest and depend on it. Like other tropical forests, the Amazon is threatened by climate change and deforestation. An area the size of Taiwan is lost every year, mainly due to the expansion of pastures for beef production. These changes are in some cases driven by larger scale landholders linked to global agribusinesses and the international demand for beef and soy, but small holders have also played a role in forest conversion. Research undertaken by the Centre for International Forestry Research, C4, in collaboration with local and national partners is helping to shed light on how the Amazon's forests can be used in more sustainable ways and improve local people's livelihoods at the same time. These are working forests. People make their livelihoods using forest products and there will be trade-offs. You need to look at the types of needs people have, the types of pressures that they're responding to and then take that into account when you're thinking about forests or making decisions about forest policy. In Ecuador, C4 scientists are mapping the dynamics of the country's extensive domestic timber market. They're examining how small holders and chainsaw millers participate in those markets and identifying the barriers preventing some of those people from engaging legally with the system. To work with programs, you need economic resources. It costs about $2,000 to be able to work with programs. And so, because of the need, sometimes we have to cut without programs too. There we can cut one or two trees to support the family. Small holders are important actors in supplying timber to these markets and you have an important number of local people that depend on timber for making a living. So whatever action that's going to be taken for the forestry sectors in these countries, they have to take into account the small holders. In Brazil's far west, researchers are analysing the innovative low-carbon development policies being implemented by the Brazilian state of Acre, a region with a long tradition of extractivist uses of the forest, especially rubber-tapping. It's really looking at rural development from a low-emissions perspective, but putting the rural development first. In Acre, most deforestation now occurs on small land holdings, so a major thrust of the government's initiative involves providing farmers with incentives and assistance designed to improve local well-being and reduce pressures on forests at the same time. They include support for sustainable agriculture, fish farming, raising chickens and managing forest products like açaí. We had to do the same for the consumption. We had to do it by hand, we had to do it by the stove, by the stove, by the stove, by the rice. And if we didn't burn it, we wouldn't have a living. Even paying a lot of money, but we wouldn't have another way out, I don't know. The fringes are wonderful now. They've got a good one, they've improved it a lot. The forestry sector has also improved, it's improved a lot, the service. The agriculture has also improved, it's improving. Everything is improving. The Ministry for Research across the Amazon supports the use of incentives combined with command and control measures as an effective way to combat deforestation. It's important to knit together a policy mix. They can also deliver some carrots and not only sticks vis-à-vis the strategy you use to combat deforestation. And that has a lot of power because people just can't be punished if they have no alternatives. You just can't give people fines that they can't afford. Cross the nearby border, in Peru, more sequel researchers are trying to discover what impact extracting timber from Brazil nut concessions has on the production of the nuts, and so help to inform more enlightened policies that allow for sustainable, multiple uses of the forest. We also see the wood here this year because we also need something else to be able to live. What we are talking about, you know, miss, is where there is no chestnut. As legal work is done, there is no problem. It's not that the forest is being cleared or there is massive over-harvesting, but there's always an effect. The originality of the study is that there's no data to really inform policy or inform, you know, best practices. And, you know, regardless of we have, you know, no effect, negative effect, or positive effect, the results are going to promote a better use. I think C4's research is important because we are going out and trying to look at these processes of development in forest landscapes from a different perspective. So it isn't just about the needs of industry. It isn't just about the needs of indigenous people or the needs of colonists or urban populations that may want to maintain a forest landscape. You have to look at the multiple demands and needs for forests.