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Demands for territorial recognition are foundational to the claiming of rights by forest-proximate people who attempt to conserve their forests. The rights of these often marginalized populations have been largely overlooked by conservationists, yet they are central to achieving people-centered conservation. We further developed the concept of forest citizenship as a normative framework and analytical tool based on Brazilian social environmentalism (socioambientalismo), florestania (a former political project in Acre state), Latin American scholarship on ecological citizenship, and Eurocentric political philosophy. Decades of struggle for territorial recognition and social inclusion have solidified the right to have rights for Amazonia’s forest citizens. Hence, forest citizens are people who have become so through the sociopolitical dynamics of their rights claims. Forest citizenship is built on community mobilization to create legally recognized territories with participatory governance but becomes tangible only if individuals and communities can successfully claim other rights from institutions through everyday practices of citizenship. We also assessed the current number and distribution of forest citizens across Brazilian Amazonia based on gridded population data and spatial analyses to calculate the resident population in four territorial categories that meet these democratic preconditions: Indigenous lands, extractive reserves, sustainable development reserves, ecological settlement projects, and Afro-descendent Quilombola territories. The territories covered 31% of the Legal Amazon, were home to 1.05 million forest citizens, and had diverse primary policy objectives but shared goals of empowering communities and conserving forests. To be emancipatory, forest citizenship must be bottom-up, socially inclusive, and improve people’s lives. We suggest that conservationists pay greater attention to power relations and decision-making structures related to forest territories. Territory-based forest citizenship may be relevant for other countries where environmentalism has intersected with struggles for land rights and democracy. 

Abstract Coral reefs worldwide are threatened by thermal stress caused by climate change. Especially devastating periods of coral loss frequently occur during El Niño‐Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events originating in the Eastern Tropical Pacific (ETP). El Niño‐induced thermal stress is considered the primary threat to ETP coral reefs. An increase in the frequency and intensity of ENSO events predicted in the coming decades threatens a pan‐tropical collapse of coral reefs. During the 1982–1983 El Niño, most reefs in the Galapagos Islands collapsed, and many more in the region were decimated by massive coral bleaching and mortality. However, after repeated thermal stress disturbances, such as those caused by the 1997–1998 El Niño, ETP corals reefs have demonstrated regional persistence and resiliency. Using a 44 year dataset (1970–2014) of live coral cover from the ETP, we assess whether ETP reefs exhibit the same decline as seen globally for other reefs. Also, we compare the ETP live coral cover rate of change with data from the maximum Degree Heating Weeks experienced by these reefs to assess the role of thermal stress on coral reef survival. We find that during the period 1970–2014, ETP coral cover exhibited temporary reductions following major ENSO events, but no overall decline. Further, we find that ETP reef recovery patterns allow coral to persist under these El Niño‐stressed conditions, often recovering from these events in 10–15 years. Accumulative heat stress explains 31% of the overall annual rate of change of living coral cover in the ETP. This suggests that ETP coral reefs have adapted to thermal extremes to date, and may have the ability to adapt to near‐term future climate‐change thermal anomalies. These findings for ETP reef resilience may provide general insights for the future of coral reef survival and recovery elsewhere under intensifying El Niño scenarios.