The Science Panel for the Amazon (SPA), convened under the auspices of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), is the world’s first regional high-level science initiative dedicated to the Amazon. Officially launched in July 2020 and comprising over 360 scientists from the eight Amazonian countries, French Guiana, and global partners, the SPA interweaves Indigenous and local knowledge with academic science to develop evidence-based solutions for sustainable development in the region. In 2025, at COP30 in Belém, the SPA launched its 2025 Amazon Assessment Report - Connectivity of the Amazon for a Living Planet, which positions ecological and sociocultural connectivity as the central strategy for conserving Amazonian ecosystems and advancing sustainable and equitable development. Building on this body of work, the SPA's new White Paper “Beyond Funding: What would it take to build a thriving and resilient socio-biodiversity research environment across the Amazon?”, addresses a critical and underexplored dimension of Amazon science: the conditions under which research is produced. Despite the Amazon's global scientific visibility, the within-Amazon research community remains fragmented, underfunded relative to the region's size and importance, and shaped by persistent asymmetries — in funding, institutional capacity, and epistemic recognition — that limit its ability to address the region's most pressing socio-ecological challenges. The White Paper draws on original analysis of research collaboration networks, funding structures, and knowledge systems to identify five interrelated challenges: communication barriers, coordination constraints, trust deficits, infrastructure gaps, and resource asymmetries. It offers practical recommendations to address each of these, with a view to building a distributed, collaborative, and epistemically diverse research community across the Amazon basin. This event will bring together the White Paper's lead authors, SPA leadership, Indigenous peoples’ leaders from the Amazon, and high-level partners to discuss these findings and their implications for science policy, research funding, and regional cooperation. The discussion will explore how governments, funding agencies, scientific institutions, and civil society can work together to create the structural conditions for a science that is more resilient, more equitable, and more effective in informing the decisions that shape the future of the Amazon.