Leonardo DiCaprio transformed himself into the celebrity face of the movement to combat climate change, donating millions to conservation causes and starring in an Al Gore-style documentary last year.

But the actors latest environmental effort takes a different approach, putting indigenous people out front.

Amazon Frontlines, a new nonprofit funded by DiCaprios foundation, plans to launch Thursday with the aim of nurturing an alliance between tribes and trumpeting stories about their fights to stop timber and oil drilling in the South American rainforest.

Amazon Frontlines is the real deal, Justin Winters, executive director of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, told HuffPost by email. This work is what urgent climate action at the community level is all about.

The group springs from an effort to provide clean water to tribes in the region whose water wells were contaminated from decades of drilling by oil giant Texaco. In 2011, Ecuadors Supreme Court ruled that Chevron, which bought Texaco for $36 billion in 2000, owed $9.5 billion in compensation for dumping more than 18 billion gallons of crude in the once-pristine rainforest a slow-moving disaster dubbed rainforest Chernobyl by environmentalists.