Since 2001, the World Social Forum (WSF) has been a periodic global gathering of civil society organizations intended to promote and advance more democratic and just social and economic alternatives to the corporate globalization economic model promoted by the World Economic Forum (WEF). In addition to the general WSF, series of specialized WSF such as the Pan Amazonian Social Forum (Foro Social Panamazónica, or FOSPA), have been organized. These began in 2002 and have been held about every two years since then.
The eighth FOSPA was held from April 28 through May 1, 2017 in Tarapoto, Peru. This was the first time the forum took place in Peru, and I was there to help the organizers with a map-based application for visualizing the alarming socio-environmental situation across the entire Amazon basin and forest ecosystem. The hope has been that better understanding of the situation will help in formulating proposals and demands to the governments of the Amazon countries for better policies and actions to avert or minimize further destruction. Like the WSF, the FOSPA is held roughly every other year.
The official website of the Pan Amazonian forum is written mostly in Spanish, but as of late some content has been translated into English. It is used to publish information about past and upcoming fora. After Tarapoto, the subsequent fora were held in Mocoa, Colombia in November 2020, in Belém, Brazil in July 2022, and in Rurrenabaque, Bolivia in June 2024.
My project for the forum is an ArcGIS story map application, “The Amazon Under Siege“, which is integrated into the home page of the forum website. The application includes a series of maps for visualizing and exploring the best available social and environmental data for the entire Amazon basin. This data includes an outline of the basin itself, all of the rivers draining into the basin, indigenous territories, protected areas, petroleum and mining concessions, hydroelectric and transportation infrastructure projects, air contamination and recent deforestation data. A brief user guide on the application is also linked from the forum home page.
Shortly after the mapping project was first released, announcements about it were published on the forum website, and on the websites of the Peruvian daily newspaper La República, the Centro Amazónico de Antropología y Aplicación Práctica, the Brazilian NGO Ecoa – Ecologia e Ação, as well as through social media.
I have updated the contents of the story map on many occasions since 2017, as new data has become available and configurations of the GIS servers accessed by the application have changed. In 2023, I added two new tabs to the story map – on impacts of large-scale agriculture and fires, and I updated the tab on air pollution. All of these themes are interrelated, as fires are started to clear land for agriculture and cause most of the toxic air pollution threatening public health both within and downwind of the Amazon.
