The road to recovery for Brazil’s beleaguered Atlantic Forest will be replanted with at least 1 billion native trees. The first few thousand are taking root now.

By Andrew Downie
 

The sky is starting to spit droplets of rain onto the rolling pastures of south-central Brazil, and Mario Barbosa Rosa Filho knows the time is right. He and his assistants pack a few hundred saplings into a grubby Volkswagen Bug and head for the hills. 

After half an hour driving down country roads, they turn onto a red dirt track and start climbing. The Bug strains its engine as it bumps its way over the rutted mud and rocks. Eventually it grinds to a halt at the bottom of a fenced-off gully through which runs a babbling stream.

Rosa Filho and his men unpack the saplings and gingerly step through a barbed wire fence. They were here before dawn doing the dirty work, clearing the grass from small patches of pasture and digging holes for the young plants. The area is pressed hard on the side of a steep hill. Now, with rain falling intermittently, the men toss fertilizer on the ground and place the saplings in the holes.

Over the past few days, Rosa Filho and his team have climbed hills like this one and planted hundreds of native saplings around the small town of Extrema, two hours’ drive from São Paulo in the rural and largely agricultural state of Minas Gerais. The land here is mostly pasture, but alongside the farmhouses and waterfalls lies the odd patch of trees. A few hundred years ago it was all untouched woodland, fabulously lush and comparable in its diversity to the Amazon.

Now, the trees are almost all gone, having been cut down first for timber, then to create fields for coffee, sugarcane, soybeans and cattle, and then to make way for the towns and cities—Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo among them—that today house more than 120 million people. The Atlantic Forest is now widely considered the world’s most endangered tropical forest.

The Nature Conservancy aims to reverse the damage. With the help of people like Rosa Filho and other partners across Brazil, the Conservancy is developing a plan to plant 1 billion native trees to reconnect what’s left of the Atlantic Forest. It is a mammoth task. But an absolutely crucial one.

“Most places where the Conservancy works, we don’t think of reforestation as a primary strategy, but in a place like the Atlantic Forest, conserving existing forest is not really enough,” says Greg Fishbein, director of conservation finance and planning. “The Atlantic Forest has been severely deforested, mostly in the past century. We need to restore a critical mass of habitat. There is an urgent need.”

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Nature picture credits (top to bottom): Photos © Scott Warren