Brazilian Blue Amazon

The Blue Amazon (Portuguese: Amazônia Azul) is the name given by the Brazilian Navy to Brazil's jurisdictional waters and continental shelf since 2004. The concept has a theoretical grounding in geopolitics and international relations and multiple facets — political-strategic, economic, environmental and scientific — with an emphasis in the first. It is a registered trademark and a central argument in the Navy's discourse for external and internal audiences, with additional usage by civilian sectors. More than an area, it is a propaganda discourse and a representation of the Brazilian perspective on the ocean's challenges and potentials, which are embedded in its analogy with the "Green" Amazon.

Its total claimed area covers 5.7 million square kilometers. Since the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) cam into force, Brazil has expanded its maritime jurisdiction by occupying the Saint Peter and Saint Paul Archipelago and surveying the South Atlantic seabed to justify extended continental shelf proposals submitted from 2004 to 2018 to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS). These proposals, and thus, the country's ultimate maritime boundaries, have yet to become final and binding under international law. By publicizing the concept of a Blue Amazon, the Navy intends to recover a "maritime mentality" within Brazilian identity after the 20th century's focus on land borders and the continental interior.

Brazil has inherited from its colonial history a coastal-centered population and relies on the sea for most of its external trade and petroleum and natural gas production. Marine pollution and overfishing burden its diverse ecosystems. Proponents of the Blue Amazon see it as an important environmental concern and a potential engine for technology-driven economic growth. Public policies for this sector are brought together by the Interministerial Commission on Marine Resources (Comissão Interministerial para os Recursos do Mar, CIRM), which is under the Navy's coordination. The Navy's mandate goes far beyond war: it is a coast guard, fields research vessels and scientific outposts, trains the merchant marine's officers and receives royalties from oil revenue.

In military thought, the "two Amazons" are resource-rich frontier zones where the state has a loose foothold, drawing in foreign greed which must be deterred by the Armed Forces. Perceived hypothetical threats are extraregional powers, which Brazilian strategists dream of keeping out of the South Atlantic, and unconventional threats such as international crime. By the 2010s, specialists agreed on the existence of shortcomings in naval combat and surveillance assets, but no conventional threat is felt in the short term. Newly discovered oil and gas reserves in the pre-salt layer encouraged ambitious naval re-equipment plans in the 2000s, but financial conditions deteriorated in the following decade and no political will was found to materialize the plans in their original form.