Brazil | August 27, 2026
The Amazon is often described through scale: the world’s largest tropical rainforest and river basin, home to extraordinary biodiversity and hundreds of distinct peoples and languages. But understanding the region also requires looking closer, at the people, projects, and relationships shaping its future.
This perspective is at the heart of Switzerland and Amazonia: Stories of Collaboration, the second report in Swissnex’s Switzerland and Amazonia series, produced with the support of Presence Switzerland. Following our first report mapping Swiss organizations active in the region, the publication presents eight examples of Swiss and Amazonian partners learning, innovating, and building solutions together.
The stories span biodiversity research, sustainable supply chains, forest governance, nature finance, food science, and the bioeconomy. They range from researchers tracing the Amazon’s “flying rivers” to understand how forests sustain rainfall, to new approaches to monitoring biodiversity with environmental DNA, from improving the processing of cupuaçu to developing digital tools that make Amazonian products traceable across global supply chains.
Other cases explore how conservation and finance can work together, how agroforestry can strengthen local livelihoods, and how innovation can emerge when technologies developed elsewhere are adapted to the realities of the territory rather than simply transferred to it.
The report, part of Swissnex’s efforts to help strengthen Switzerland’s engagement with the Amazon region, does not present a single model for collaboration. Its eight cases differ in scale, geography, and approach. What connects them is a shared recognition that solutions for the Amazon cannot be developed in isolation. Scientific research, technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and finance all depend on collaboration with the people and institutions that know the region and live with its transformations.
The Swiss organizations featured in this report are: Silvania, Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Lynx Technologies, University of Zurich, Earthworm Foundation, Wyss Academy for Nature at the University of Bern, Clariant, and the Ecosystems and Landscape Evolution group at ETH Zurich.