Barbara Zimmerman

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Barbara is the Director Kayapo Project on behalf of the International Conservation Fund of Canada playing a key role in support of Indigenous Peoples in conservation of very large areas of forest in Brazilian Amazon.

Barbara Zimmerman

Barbara is the Director of the Kayapo Project on behalf of the International Conservation Fund of Canada playing a key role in support of Indigenous Peoples in conservation of very large areas of forest in Brazilian Amazon. She also has experience in capacity-building for territorial control and environmentally sustainable economic development and biodiversity conservation.

In 1989 Barbara Zimmerman became involved with the indigenous activist movement of the Kayapo Indians of the Brazilian Amazon. Since then, she has worked with partner NGO’s and Kayapo communities to help the Kayapo strengthen their capacity for protecting 95,000 km2 of their legally ratified territories from deforestation.

The first conservation enterprise with a Kayapo community was a biological research station that Dr Zimmerman established with the community of A’Ukre in 1992. The success of the A’Ukre conservation and development model led international NGO supporters to expand investment with the Kayapo. Dr Zimmerman helps with coordination and funding of conservation and development programs with the Kayapo. The objective is to empower the Kayapo to continue protecting 9,500,000 ha of their lands in the highly threatened southeastern Amazon.

Environmental Defense Fund is a US-based nonprofit environmental advocacy group known for its work on issues including global warming, ecosystem restoration, oceans, and human health, and advocates using sound science, economics and law. More about Environmental Defense Fund.
Environmental Defence Fund

Barbara's project publications

Kayapo women carrying items

Large-scale forest conservation with an Indigenous People in the Amazon

13/10/2020
This book chapter examines the struggle of the Kayapó to protect their constitutional territorial rights in the highly-threatened southeastern Amazon of Brazil. 21st century alliances of the Kayapò with conservation organisations have enabled protection of over 9 million hectares of their contiguous ratified territories.
Logging in the Amazon

Protecting primary forests

30/03/2019
Brendan Mackey, Director of Griffith University's Climate Change Response Program, speaks at Woods Hole Research Center on March 21, 2019 on "Protecting Primary Forests: How We Can Get There and Why it Affects Us All".
Rainforest trees

Prospects for sustainable logging in tropical forest

14/10/2012
There is a convincing body of evidence shows that, as it is presently codified, sustainable forest-management logging implemented at an industrial scale guarantees commercial and biological depletion of high-value timber species within three harvests in all three major tropical forest regions.