A new study shows that restored private lands in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest achieved up to 20% more forest cover than unrestored neighboring private lands.
- With 75% of the Atlantic Forest in private hands and a 6.2-million-hectare (15.3-million-acre) deficit of native vegetation, according to the law, private landowners are key to recovery.
- Over the past decade, forest gains and losses in the Atlantic Forest have essentially stagnated; but last year, half of all deforestation hit mature forests over 40 years old, threatening biodiversity and carbon stocks.
Restoration in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest is finding success on private lands, according to a newly published study. Researchers evaluated the Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact, a collaborative initiative launched in 2009 to accelerate reforestation, and found a 20% increase in vegetation cover on studied private lands from 2000-2018 compared to areas without intervention.
The pact works across 17 Brazilian states and brings together governments, NGOs, companies and landowners to identify priority areas for restoration, support implementation, and monitor environmental, social and economic outcomes. The end goal is to restore 15 million hectares (37 million acres) of forest by 2050.
“Landowners report that after starting restoration planting, springs returned, streams filled, and the land cooled,” says biologist Ludmila Pugliese de Siqueira, co-author of the new study and director of the landscape and forest restoration program at Conservation International Brazil. “For them, the result is very tangible — something that directly affects their daily lives.”
The study examined 158,000 hectares (about 390,000 acres) of land, half of it restored and the rest unrestored. In all, they found a net increase in vegetation cover of 4,600 hectares (about 11,400 acres) in the form of restored forest, an area roughly 80% the size of Manhattan or 13.5 times the size of Central Park.
Still, restoring forest on privately owned land in the Atlantic Forest remains a major challenge. About 75% of the biome is private property, and nearly 90% of its original vegetation, around 110 million hectares (272 million acres), has been lost to agriculture, pasture, logging, mining and urban expansion. It’s estimated that one-third of South America’s population lives within the forest’s original boundaries.
The Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact prioritizes the protection of legal reserves, the portion of private property that landowners are required to preserve, and permanent preservation areas, zones within private and public lands that safeguard water sources and fragile ecosystems, and which landowners are also obliged to maintain under Brazil’s Forest Code. The pact also focuses on areas surrounding conservation units, protected areas that are home to endemic or threatened wildlife species and less suitable for agriculture.
