Most conservation strategies start by drawing a line around a forest and keeping people out. UNESCO’s biosphere reserves start from the opposite assumption: that the communities living inside the world’s most ecologically vital landscapes aren’t the problem but part of the solution.
Across 142 countries, more than 700 designated biosphere reserves cover over 7.5 million square kilometers. They operate as what UNESCO calls “living laboratories,” places where biodiversity conservation, scientific research, and the needs of local communities are managed together, not traded off against each other.
At a time of accelerating climate and biodiversity crises, UNESCO’s MAB Programme is more relevant than ever, advancing solutions where science, communities and sustainable development come together. Bringing the Council back to Latin America and the Caribbean after a decade also recognises the region’s growing leadership in shaping global responses to environmental challenges.
That work is what brings 250 participants scientists, government representatives from 34 countries, UN agencies and NGOs to Paraguay this week for the 38th session of the Man and the Biosphere Programme’s International Coordinating Council, the first major governance meeting under the Programme’s new 2026–2035 strategic plan.
The host site itself is a working argument for the model. Paraguay’s Itaipu Biosphere Reserve spans nearly one million hectares of eastern Paraguay, home to 250,000 people including Indigenous communities and smallholders whose knowledge and livelihoods are woven into its management. At its ecological core lies the Upper Paraná Atlantic Forest — one of the most biodiverse and most threatened ecosystems on Earth, sheltering pumas, tapirs, peccaries and hundreds of plant species, many of them endemic or found nowhere else.
Itaipu’s selection as host is no coincidence. It represents international cooperation, renewable energy and regional integration, and Paraguay’s commitment to sustainable development, climate action and biodiversity conservation.
But Itaipu is not just a conservation zone. It is a restoration story. Centuries of agricultural expansion reduced South America’s Atlantic Forest to fragments. The protected areas managed by ITAIPU Binacional, the hydroelectric company that jointly runs the reserve, now contain the largest surviving patch of the Upper Paraná Atlantic Forest left in Paraguay, stretching 1,524 kilometres to form an unbroken wildlife corridor across the country.
The Itaipu Preserva Project has gone further still, actively rebuilding what was lost. At almost 3,000 hectares, it is Paraguay’s largest native forest restoration initiative. Four million trees have been planted across around 100 native and fruit-bearing species, many of them threatened. The seedlings come largely from ITAIPU Binacional’s own nursery, the largest of its kind in the region, producing 1.2 million native plants a year and supplying Indigenous communities and environmental education programmes across the country.
READ MORE: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/unesco-charts-new-path-people-and-nature?hub=701
