HOUSTON — The Amazon rainforest may be thousands of miles from Houston, but according to one leading scientist, what happens there affects all of us.

From weather patterns and food production to medicines and everyday products, the world’s largest rainforest plays a far greater role in daily life than many people realize.

Those connections were the focus of an American Community Media news briefing featuring Dr. Rosa Vásquez Espinoza, a Peruvian chemical biologist, National Geographic Explorer and founder of Amazon Research Internacional. During the discussion, she explained how combining Indigenous knowledge with modern science is helping researchers better understand—and protect—one of the planet’s most important ecosystems.

For communities far from South America, Dr. Vásquez Espinoza said the Amazon’s influence is much closer than many people think.

“Every aspect of our life is impacted by what happens in the Amazon forest,” she said. “Let’s start with the patterns of rains and storms. Our weather does get impacted by the amount of water fluctuations that occur in the Amazonian forest, which at the same time gets impacted by deforestation.”

She explained that the rainforest helps influence weather systems through the enormous amount of water stored and released by its trees. As forests are cleared, those natural cycles are disrupted, affecting rainfall, oceans and storm patterns far beyond the Amazon itself.

The Amazon’s impact also reaches grocery stores and medicine cabinets.

Dr. Vásquez Espinoza noted that products many families use every day—including coffee, cacao and ingredients used in FDA-approved medicines—have ties to the rainforest. She encouraged people to think more intentionally about where everyday products come from and how consumer choices can make a difference.

“I think it’s important to remember what could we do from whatever angle we can,” she said. “Even if it’s to share a story or to read more about it or to even ask ourselves where is my food coming from or where is this material that I’m about to purchase coming from can make a huge difference.”

Throughout the conversation, Dr. Vásquez Espinoza emphasized that Indigenous communities have spent generations carefully observing and understanding the rainforest. Increasingly, scientists are finding that this ancestral knowledge complements modern research rather than competing with it.

“I feel like in a way modern science is catching up with ancestral knowledge,” she said. “Traditional knowledge… has a basis similar to the scientific method” through observation, testing and passing knowledge from one generation to the next.

Although climate change and deforestation present significant challenges, Dr. Vásquez Espinoza offered an optimistic message. She said meaningful change doesn’t always begin with sweeping global policies—it often starts with local action.

“I am a big proponent to say to change the world we need to first just focus on what’s around us and what can we change,” she said. “Even though it may feel minuscule and we’re not doing enough, if we all focus on that we would achieve change much faster than anything we’ve ever seen before.”

Her message was simple: protecting one of the world’s most important ecosystems doesn’t always begin in the Amazon. Sometimes it begins at home—with the questions we ask, the products we buy and the small choices we make every day.