ESI Stories

Exploring Sustainable Bioeconomies: An MIT Delegation’s Journey into the Peruvian Amazon

By: Marco Herndon, Program Associate and Marcela Ángel, Research Program Director

In January 2025, a delegation from MIT that included faculty, researchers, and students traveled to the Peruvian Amazon — one of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems — to explore sustainable bioeconomies and conservation efforts. The weeklong journey was organized by the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI) in collaboration with Amanatari, a Peruvian nonprofit dedicated to fostering businesses that generate income for local communities based on the unique biodiversity of the Amazon while preserving the standing forest, such as stingless bees and aguaje oil and fibers. Last year, MIT, Amanatari, and the Peru’s University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) began a five-year collaboration to undertake research and pedagogical activities in service of the conservation of the Amazon and the sustainable development of Amazonian cities and local communities. The first year of collaboration has focused on understanding local environmental priorities, building strong cross-institutional relationships, and convening a broader MIT research community to create a collaborative research agenda.

The MIT, Amanatari, and UTEC delegation with family members of the Flores brothers and community members in Parinari. Photo credit: Amanatari

The Amazon has faced long-standing environmental and socioeconomic challenges, with research and innovation efforts in the region historically struggling to gain traction. As José Alvarez, Amanatari’s territorial management lead with over 30 years of experience in the region, cautioned, “The Amazon is the graveyard for all research projects.” To counteract these challenges, Amanatari is working to develop biobusinesses and secure economic incentives for conservation by removing bottlenecks and advancing enabling conditions, such as water access, sustainable energy, and land rights for local communities to manage forests sustainably.

MIT’s delegation — which included faculty and researchers with expertise in urban planning, international development, Indigenous-based planning, and environmental engineering — joined Amanatari on this trip for firsthand insights into the bioeconomy’s potential and its structural challenges. It included Professor Gabriella Carolini, Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Studies; Dr. Leonardo Capeleto, Postdoctoral Associate at the City Infrastructure Equity Lab; Kathleen Julca, a fourth-year student in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP); Stephen Hart, Research Associate at the LCAU; Larisa Ovalles, Research Associate at the UrbanRISK Lab; Marcela Ángel, Research Program Director at the MIT ESI; and Marco Herndon, Research Associate at the MIT ESI. Their insights were related to of identifying culturally pertinent business models, facilitating adaptable water and sanitation solutions, and ensuring a fair exchange of labor and commerce.

Urban Gateways to the Amazon Bioeconomy

The MIT delegation’s journey began in Lima, where they met with UTEC researchers at the newly formed Amazon Sustainability Research Institute, and Amanatari’s CEO, Bernardo Sambra. These discussions focused on how to strengthen sustainable value chains — such as the production of nature-based goods and services through biobusinesses — all while balancing the urgency of offsetting deforestation with the prioritization of Indigenous knowledge, given the Amazon’s long history of exploitation. The team also engaged with industry leaders already operating in the bioeconomy, including the AJE Group, a multinational beverage company producing drinks from Amazonian superfruits, and Mapunto, a fashion and textile company using Amazonian fibers such as chambira (Astrocaryum chambira) and punga (Pachira brevipes) in collaboration with Indigenous women weavers. These businesses offer numerous opportunities for research and innovation that can strengthen sustainable value chains, including monitoring the bioeconomy’s social and ecological impacts, and creating cooperation models that safeguard Indigenous communities, their governance, and self-organizing capacities.

Following a rich exchange of ideas in Lima, the group traveled to Iquitos, the largest city in the Peruvian Amazon, which is located in the department of Loreto. It is one of the most highly conserved areas of the Amazon Rainforest, home to the headwaters of important tributaries of the Amazon River and its most extensive peatland. Here, they met with Carmen Dávila, Director of the Research Institute of the Peruvian Amazon (IIAP), and officials from the National Service for Protected Areas (SERNANP), gaining valuable insights from the region’s broader ecosystem of researchers and policymakers investing in conservation and biodiversity management initiatives. These ranged from restoring aquatic ecosystems to recuperating riverbeds destroyed by illegal mining — all critical for ecosystem health and sustainable livelihoods.

Navigating the Amazon: Community-Led Conservation and Innovation Projects

The next phase of the trip brought the delegation deeper into the Amazon, traveling by boat along the Amazon River and its tributaries to visit three rural, Indigenous communities engaged in high-potential biobusinesses. These communities, with origins in diverse Indigenous cultures and each facing distinct threats, are central to Amanatari’s efforts to develop scalable, sustainable economic models that could be replicated across the Amazon. 

Marco Herndon, a co-author of this article, found visiting these areas to be deeply valuable and enriching. He sees the bioeconomy as an emerging strategy for conservation and development in the Amazon, and in his experience, traveling on the ground was critical in learning how communities were engaged in creating their new livelihoods, the challenges they faced in doing so, and where research could support them. Since many of these communities were very remote and communicated through relationships and storytelling, in-person visits were indispensable in introducing himself and his team appropriately in the context. 

The MIT delegation navigates the Río Napo, en route to Sucusari. Photo credit: Amanatari

Maijuna Stingless Beekeeping: A Model for Technology-Enhanced Learning

The Maijuna Indigenous peoples inhabit the Sucusari community near the Río Napo and have long fought for their territorial rights, securing a 391,093-hectare regional conservation area in 2015. Having faced numerous threats to their survival and now numbering just over 500 people, today they are engaged in stingless beekeeping (Melipona Eburnea) — among other bioeconomic activities — and recuperating ancestral ecological knowledge to produce sustainably harvested honey with the support of One Planet, a non-profit led by ethnobiologist Michael Gilmore. Through a participatory knowledge-sharing initiative named the Bee Schools (in Spanish, escuelas de abeja), the Maijuna have developed methods to collect wild forest beehives and recreate their conditions for honey production without cutting down trees. They currently sell the honey produced by these bees at a small-scale to local tourists and buyers in Peru. 

As a biobusiness model replicable at the family-scale, research partnerships with MIT to assess and certify the honey’s unique chemical properties could contribute to expanding its value chains and potential as a significant alternative source of income for local communities. MIT researchers also identified collaboration potential to build upon the success of the Bee School and establish Biodiversity Monitoring Academies as nodes for biodiversity data collection, knowledge sharing, and capacity building. These would contribute to building more transparent data and institutions while reducing entry barriers for Indigenous and local communities’ participation in bioeconomic activities.     

Aguaje Oil Production in Parinari: Overcoming Water and Sanitation Bottlenecks

In Parinari, an Indigenous community located within the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, the Flores brothers have led a community-driven enterprise since 1997, producing oil from aguaje (Mauritia flexuosa) — one of the Amazon’s most abundant palms — using sustainable methods. Instead of cutting down aguaje trees, the Flores brothers invented and use a maquisapa, a harness that allows harvesters to safely climb the 20-40 meter trees and pick the fruits. Their production plant is located in the Parinari village and is powered by solar and natural gas for a hot aguaje oil extraction process, providing income to local women and aguaje harvesters. Their company extracts aguaje fruit from a parcel in an aguaje marshland collectively owned by the community. 

Despite significant innovation achievements, challenges remain — transitioning to cold-pressed extraction processes required by international buyers, securing access to clean water and renewable energy, improving sanitation, and implementing systematic quality controls for sustainably sourced fruit. Amanatari, in collaboration with faculty and researchers from MIT’s DUSP, seek to leverage research-based innovation and integrated water management planning processes at the regional level to facilitate the implementation of ecosystem-based adaptation interventions for riverfront communities, such as Parinari. These interventions could include investments in conservation, restoration, agroforestry, and low-tech water and sanitation solutions that support the provision of water-based ecosystem services for current and future use. All of these are critical in supporting biobusinesses and guaranteeing water security for riverfront communities under diversified climate risks.  

The MIT delegation hears from Einstein Flores, co-owner of the Flores brother’s aguaje processing business in Parinari. Photo credit: Amanatari

Superfibers in 20 de Enero Community: Learning from Women-Led Biobusinesses

The delegation further enriched their knowledge of superfibers in the 20 de Enero community, also located in Pacaya-Samiria. After a guided tour to view the aguaje, chambira, and punga trees in the surrounding forests, the group met with local weavers — primarily Indigenous women — who had diversified their methods to create superfibers through workshops organized by Amanatari in partnership with Mapunto and local organizations. Many of the women produce crafts from chambira palm fibers, and the workshops have built upon this knowledge base, introducing new skills to produce finer quality and higher value fibers. MIT and Amanatari are well aware that bioeconomic development projects must respond to gender-based relationships with respect to land tenure, labor, and traditional customs — particularly around water use and collection — and any interventions must support the social systems that safeguard Indigenous women.    

Looking Aahead: Leveraging the Bioeconomy and Sustainable Urban Development in the Amazon

Throughout the trip, the MIT delegation experienced both the unique biodiversity of the Peruvian Amazon and witnessed the systemic barriers to “green” sustainable development. While initiatives like stingless beekeeping, aguaje oil production, and superfibers offer promising local economic development models, they require complex technical and logistical governance, as well as regulatory support to scale successfully. Most importantly, the bioeconomy’s large-scale potential to counterbalance deforestation and extractive industries like illegal economies, and to catalyze a transition towards planned and sustainable urban development models in Amazonian corridors, remains an understudied critical area for research. Urban and peri-urban spaces around Iquitos — as well as rural communities like Sucusari, Parinari, and 20 de Enero — face a series of collective stressors common across the Amazon watershed: the lack of universal treatment for household and industrial water sanitation systems, poor solid waste management, high rates of poverty, childhood malnourishment, accelerated rural-to-urban migrations, and more. All of these factors are interconnected with biodiversity loss and climate change, exacerbating environmental and public health vulnerabilities. The bioeconomy inherently relies on environmental health, and so its growth and impact must be assessed not just in terms of sheer profits, but through an equity-driven evaluation framework that considers wider societal needs intertwined with the ecosystem’s ecological transformations and conservation challenges. 

MIT, in collaboration with Amanatari, UTEC, and the broader ecosystem of stakeholders engaged in urban planning and bioeconomic development in the Amazon — including SINCHI in Colombia, IIAP in Peru, and the Mamirauá Institute in Brazil — is committed to advancing research that positions the bioeconomy and planned, sustainable urban “green” development as a viable, alternative economic development model. This effort has the strong potential to ensure the protection of the Amazon watershed while supporting the local communities who have historically been its stewards and rely on its natural resources for their livelihoods.

As Marcela Ángel, a co-author of this article, reflected on the trip, she found that it expanded the MIT’s team understanding of local priorities, created great momentum, and underscored the importance of collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches in tackling environmental, urban, and socioeconomic challenges intertwined in the Amazon. MIT’s continued engagement through Amanatari and UTEC represents an opportunity to contribute action-oriented research and technological innovations to support sustainable development in one of the world’s most vital ecosystems.