Our History

In the late 1980s, images of Amazon destruction began to gain relevance in Brazilian and world press. Accelerated deforestation, fires, predatory logging, and gold mines’ proliferation exerted tremendous environmental and social pressure on the region. At that time, the American ecologist Christopher Uhl, then a visiting researcher at Embrapa, researched degraded areas in eastern Pará and was concerned with little understanding and scarce documentation of these transformations in the Amazonian landscape. He understood that the scarcity of applied research on such changes weakened the debate about the causes of this environmental degradation and alternatives for a sustainable Amazon. Uhl also found a great lack of professionals with higher education able to study these phenomena in a multidisciplinary way and report them in a didactic and strategic way to decision-makers. In this crisis, he identified an opportunity to serve the Amazon and, in partnership with Adalberto Veríssimo, David McGrath and Paulo Barreto, decided to create Imazon, an applied and multidisciplinary research institute to study (with an emphasis on the empirical approach) and seek solutions to the crucial problems of the use and conservation of natural resources in Amazon.

The idea of creating Imazon was born in 1988, but its foundation only occurred on July 10, 1990.  Over more than two years, Uhl, Veríssimo, MacGrath and Barreto discussed the mission, values and the approach of the future institute´s work. To this end, they reviewed other institutional experiences in Brazil and the humid tropics and established debates on the proposal of creating Imazon with dozens of intellectual, social and political leaders in Amazon. Currently, Veríssimo and Barreto are senior researchers at Imazon and Chris Uhl returned to the United States in 1995 and is a professor at Pennsylvania State University. MacGrath, in turn, is a professor at Naea (UFPA) and an associate researcher at Ipam.

The consolidation of Imazon over decades of existence would not have been possible without the contribution of more than a hundred employees who worked at the Institute over that time, dozens of visiting researchers and associates, and members of the Institute’s director and advisory boards . Finally, Imazon has had a broad and productive partnership with a series of public, private and non-governmental institutions in its multiple activities, in addition to the partnership with national and international financiers who have generously supported it in carrying out its activities.