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Resurrection

From Exploration to Sequestration

When Portuguese explorer Pedro Alvares Cabral sailed into a sheltered bay off the coast of Brazil on April 22, 1500, he looked out toward a string of pristine beaches fringed with a thick growth of fabulously diverse plant and animal life known as the Mata Atlântica, or Atlantic Forest.

Leading the largest expedition ever to leave Lisbon, Cabral was heading for India and the promises of spices, precious stones, silk and perfumes. The only obvious thing this mysterious new land had to offer was trees. It was not a prospect that appealed to Cabral, and he remained just long enough to stock up on provisions and repair his battered boats before heading back out to sea.

The Portuguese crown was intrigued by Cabral’s discovery, however, and before long ships of colonizers were arriving in Brazil to take advantage of those very same trees, a commodity that although not glamorous was nevertheless useful. The Brazilwood trunks yielded a coveted red dye, and the hardwood timber was ideal for making ships and furniture. The Portuguese set about chopping down the trees, working their way up and down the coast and farther and farther inland. By 1605, more than 2 million trees had been cut down and shipped back to Europe.

It was the beginning of the end of the Mata Atlântica. Its destruction has been so thorough that the British journal Nature recently listed the Atlantic Forest as one of the world’s five most endangered hot spots, areas it described as "featuring exceptional concentrations of endemic species and experiencing exceptional loss of habitat."

In the state of Paraná, 1,600 miles south of where Cabral landed and today the site of Ferretti’s restoration project, the Atlantic Forest has fared better than almost anywhere else. Because much of the terrain is mountainous and therefore inaccessible, about half the original forest has survived, compared with just 1 percent in some northeastern states.

A map showing the orginial extent of the Atlantic forest and the forest remaining today.

Here in the Itaqui Reserve, a vast expanse of land that rises from the sea through Atlantic shore mangroves, across flat fields and up to the towering Serra do Mar mountains, pristine forest grades into land that was cleared for pasture in the 1970s and 1980s after the Paraná government, in a bid to stimulate the economy, offered local landowners tax breaks to rear Asian water buffalo. The terrain is both bleak and beautiful. At times the pasture extends for miles, with only the odd house or dirt track to interrupt the expanse of cleared land; at other points, swollen rivers hurry down dark green mountainsides past picturesque cobbled roads shaded by brightly flowering bushes.

Some 16,800 hectares of this land now belong to the Sociedade de Pesquisa em Vida Selvagem e Educaçao Ambiental (SPVS), a Brazilian nongovernmental organization that is working with The Nature Conservancy to return the terrain to its former glory. SPVS had wanted to carry out reforestation projects here a few years ago but was unable to come up with the money needed to purchase huge tracts of land.

That problem was solved when two U.S. companies, General Motors and American Electric Power, provided $15.4 million in the past two years to fund the land purchase and its restoration; The Nature Conservancy brokered the carbon sequestration arrangements. With increasing interest in reducing the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, these companies are looking for ways to supplement the reductions in carbon-dioxide emissions they are making in their core businesses. They see carbon sequestration through reforestation as a way to slow the effects of global warming and, at the same time, gain some valuable public relations points for taking voluntary action against climate change.

The companies are taking a gamble, because there is no guarantee that they will get any financial return on their investment. Although the companies may receive credits for the carbon that these forests capture, no one really knows exactly how the market for carbon will work. What is clear is that it has the potential to revolutionize the relationship between multinationals and environmental groups.