About Two Basins Initiative

The Amazon and Congo River Basins are among the Earth’s great stabilising forces. Together they regulate rainfall across four continents, store billions of tonnes of carbon, sustain extraordinary biodiversity, and provide livelihoods to more than a hundred million people. They have done so for millennia. Both are now approaching the point of no return.

What is unfolding is not a single crisis but a convergence of them: ecological collapse, economic precarity, weak governance, conflict, justice deficits, illicit economies, and more. each feeding the other. In other words: the crisis is systemic. Forests fall because existing systems make destruction rational and protection costly. At the same time, so much effort has is is being put in saving the Basins. Why is it not working?

Funded by the SNF, the Tällberg Foundation convened a workshop in Cartagena, Colombia in July 2025, with experts on biodiversity, climate change, economics, governance, geopolitics, the Amazon, the Congo, Southeast Asia, the Arctic and indigenous people to explore possible responses to the crises of the two Basins. The group that came together has now grown into the Cartagena Group, that has developed the problem analysis and developed responses.

Why What We’ve Tried Isn’t Working

Decades of global commitments, pledges, and conservation programmes have not reversed the curve. There are four reasons why.
Top-down hasn’t reached the ground. Political frameworks and international agreements have produced important commitments, but they have not reshaped the lived incentive structures in the communities where forests are actually cut, burned, or protected. Local projects, meanwhile, have generated remarkable ingenuity. But they remain isolated islands in a sea of systemic pressure.

The pieces don’t connect. Climate and biodiversity measures, economic development strategies, governance reform, peace, and justice delivery are addressed separately by different actors, in different rooms, on different timelines. Without integration, each intervention is undermined by the others.

The political tide has turned. Major powers have deprioritised climate and biodiversity. Multilateralism is under severe strain. Development and environmental funding is being cut. The architecture of international cooperation is eroding faster than alternatives are being built.
The minerals moment cuts both ways. The green transition has ignited unprecedented demand for minerals found primarily in these Basins. That pressure could accelerate destruction or, with the right governance and economic models, become a once-in-a-generation catalyst for change. The window will not stay open.

The Cartagena Group concluded:

“We don’t need another global plan. We need a thousand local engines of change that can talk to each other.”

The Hot Spot Approach

From that came the Hot Spot approach, which we are starting to roll out.

Hot Spots are carefully selected geographic areas where ecological urgency, governance opportunity, and economic potential intersect. They are not projects. They are integrated architectures, engines of change designed from day one to connect local action to national systems and Basin-wide outcomes.

Each Hot Spot brings together communities, public authorities, civil society, and private actors around shared goals and aligned incentives. The work integrates, from the outset, what conventional approaches address separately: ecological and climate expertise, sustainable economic livelihood models, effective institutions and justice delivery, crime disruption, local leadership, and a continuous learning and monitoring architecture that lets knowledge scale.

The approach builds on what already works, moves where there is genuine local receptiveness, and is designed to grow, connecting Hot Spots horizontally to each other and vertically to national systems, so that each breakthrough contributes to something larger than itself.

What It Delivers

For governments, Hot Spots are practical examples for social stability, economic development, and concrete delivery to citizens, with potential to scale.

For the private sector, they reduce fragmentation and risk by aligning public authority, community legitimacy, data, and investment conditions within defined geographies, making sustainable economic activity genuinely viable.

For communities, the approach shifts power, opportunity, and protection closer to where people live. It strengthens local voice and leadership, aligns community priorities with responsible investment, and builds the ecological foundations that sustain livelihoods over the long term.

For funders and investors, Hot Spots offer leverage and ways to de-risk investments. Rather than supporting isolated projects, resources contribute to integrated systems that generate shared data, replicable learning, and scalable models capable of influencing outcomes across entire Basins.

Join Us

The first two pilots are being developed in the Amazon and Congo Basins. We are building the partnerships, testing the method, and proving that this works.

Partners for this project include WWF, Reos Partners, the Tällberg Foundation, a growing group of academic partners, and the members of the Cartagena Group.

For more information, contact XXX