- By 2030, Brazil aims to restore 12 million hectares (30 million acres) of degraded land through the Planaveg initiative, revised and launched by the government at the recent COP16 biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia.
- Experts have welcomed the move amid growing international commitments to protect biodiversity and stabilize the climate, but point to challenges such as securing resources and social mobilization.
- As ambitious as the target is, it still falls short of the 20.7 million hectares (51.2 million acres) of native vegetation that have been illegally degraded just on private rural plots.
At last month’s United Nations biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia, the Brazilian delegation proposed an ambitious program: Under its newly revised initiative to restore native ecosystems, it would reforest 12 million hectares of land — about 30 million acres, or half the size of the U.K. — by 2030.
Experts interviewed by Mongabay have welcomed the initiative, known as Planaveg, but noted the challenges of restoring an area this vast within such a short period.
Marcelo Elvira, executive secretary of the Observatory of the Forest Code (OCF), said his NGO is “optimistic about the new Planaveg,” describing it as the result of a collaborative process led by the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change. “We expect this initiative to get the Forest Code off the ground,” he said, but added that “Planaveg is a direction … it’s not only an initiative of the federal government, it also needs the state governments [on board].”
The Forest Code Thermometer, an index that monitors the implementation of Brazil’s Forest Code and developed by NGOs and research institutes including the OCF, shows widespread noncompliance with the code. It records 20.7 million hectares (51.2 million acres) of native vegetation on private land that should have been preserved but wasn’t. This includes areas designated as permanent conservation areas (APPs) and legal reserves. According to the OCF, legal reserves — the area of native vegetation on a rural plot that must be preserved — account for the largest share, with 17.8 million hectares (44 million acres) degraded.
The original Planaveg, implemented in 2017, was meant to address this problem by rolling out restoration and reforestation initiatives. The revised plan (“Planaveg 2.0”) marks an improvement because it was drawn up through a collaborative process, according to Rômulo Batista, spokesperson for Greenpeace Brazil.
“The updating of the plan involved different sectors, including government, civil society and the private sector, promoting inclusive and participatory governance,” he said. He added that “the plan emphasizes the integration of restoration with socioeconomic development, with the aim of reducing inequalities and promoting food security.”
However, Batista identified challenges: “Implementing the plan will require effective coordination between different levels of government and sectors, as well as robust financial mechanisms to make the proposed actions viable.” In addition, he said, the involvement and active participation of local communities will be central to the success of this initiative, by “respecting traditional knowledge and promoting direct benefits.”
Mauricio Bianco, vice president of Conservation International Brazil, which is already carrying out restoration projects across the country, welcomed the plan as a way to scale up these efforts.
“We have restoration models that are pilots for testing and models that are linked to the market, with private companies, to achieve scale,” he said. “All of this has a direct impact on this public policy.”
CI Brazil also announced at the Cali biodiversity summit, known as COP16, a partnership with the re.green initiative to restore up to 12,000 hectares (30,000 acres) of native vegetation in the Amazon Rainforest and the Cerrado savanna, but with an initial focus on the Atlantic Forest in Bahia state.
Also during COP16, a study highlighting the importance of forest restoration in addressing the climate crisis and biodiversity loss was published in the journal Nature by a team of Brazilian and international researchers. It identified a total of 215 million hectares (531 million acres) of land across tropical forest countries — an area larger than Mexico — with the potential for natural regeneration at lower cost than assisted forest restoration. Of this total, 55.12 million hectares (136.2 million acres) are located in Brazil, amounting to an area larger than France.
Why the first version of Planaveg failed to progress
Thiago Belote, conservation specialist at WWF-Brazil, said the first version of Planaveg was undermined by “the significant weakening of the environmental agenda promoted by the previous government” of Jair Bolsonaro.
“Crucial decision-making spaces were extinguished or weakened,” he said, including Conaveg, the national commission established to oversee the plan. The commission was one of several civil society participation forums abolished by executive decree shortly after Bolsonaro took office in early 2019.
Belote also noted the “environment of antagonism created between environmental organizations and landowners,” and the withdrawal by the Bolsonaro administration of Brazil’s previous commitment to the Paris climate agreement to restore 12 million hectares of native vegetation.
“These actions made it difficult to implement Planaveg,” he said.
Yet even under Bolsonaro’s four-year rule, Brazil still made some progress on the environmental front, “driven by civil society, which, in partnership with segments of the private sector and sub-national governments, has strengthened and articulated restoration collectives, state and municipal policies, and voluntary initiatives in various Brazilian biomes,” Belote said.
Among the highlights, he said, was the “significant progress in monitoring restoration in Brazil, exemplified by the Restoration and Reforestation Observatory, which has already identified 150,000 hectares [371,000 acres] under restoration in the country.” These efforts “have focused on overcoming the challenges identified in the first version of Planaveg, while maintaining the target of 12 million hectares as a reference,” Belote said.
Environment ministry officials “played an essential role in the continuity of the plan, even during the past administration, preserving, for example, technical advisory chambers,” he said. This made it possible for “the new government to reestablish participatory governance and reactivate Conaveg itself, culminating in a new version of the plan that is robust, based on science and built with the collaboration of various sectors of Brazilian society,” he added.
Practical considerations for restoration
Gabriela Savian, director of public policy at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM), said international commitments are fundamental to driving national commitments, by championing “a political position that goes beyond governments” when it comes to the climate and biodiversity agendas.
Regarding international funding, however, she said that “cooperation has played an important role, but it’s still not enough to meet the needs needed to deliver on these promises.” Faced with this challenge, she pointed to “the importance of innovation and collaboration with the private sector in financing public-private arrangements to channel resources toward priority conservation actions.”
Although the current level of funding still doesn’t cover all the actions needed to preserve, restore and enhance biodiversity, Savian said she believes “Brazil has shown that, in order to increase the supply of resources, it is possible to rely on a variety of financial mechanisms that make it possible to channel funds into conservation actions, whether they come from international cooperation or the private sector.”
One positive outcome from COP16, she said, was the Brazilian delegation’s presentation of the Tropical Forests Forever Fund (TFFF) as an innovative mechanism for conserving forests and compensating for the maintenance of preserved areas.
Savian also emphasized that Brazil has “led and actively participated in political commitment platforms, in collaboration with Amazonian countries and other nations, in search of funding,” a proactive role that she said is “crucial for the country to maintain its leading role in international agendas, especially on climate and the environment.”
Clóvis Borges, director of the Society for Wildlife Research and Environmental Education (SPVS), also welcomed the new Planaveg initiative.
“[It] could represent an important tool for conserving biodiversity and combating climate change,” he said, but added that, like any intervention to address nature degradation, it must be well-calibrated. “Sources of funding and convincing the public involved represent additional and critically important challenges to be addressed,” Borges said.
“Based on the overarching goal of biodiversity conservation, each biome and each ecoregion within our biomes have different intervention needs that fit the definition of restoration,” he went on. “Territories that still have large portions of well-preserved remaining areas assimilate agroforestry practices in the already degraded stretches as a positive measure for conservation.”
He cited the example of the coastal region between the states of São Paulo and Paraná, “where there is a large proportion of areas that are still well-conserved and only patches of areas where there has been suppression, and the use has low added-value production.” By contrast, Borges said, “largely degraded territories demand other strategies, such as actions to protect the fragments that still exist as a top priority.”
As such, he said, restoration interventions can’t take a one-size-fits-all approach.
“In order to have effective results, they must be based on case-by-case assessments in search of the best way to move forward with an intervention that adds value to conservation,” he said. “And, in the case of the Atlantic Forest biome, practically 100% of its remnants have varying degrees of degradation. In other words, they must all undergo different restoration interventions.”
Borges said these considerations must be taken alongside control and management initiatives, such as the removal of exotic species and monitoring against illegal hunting and extraction, as well as fighting fires, among other measures.
Mariana Oliveira, forestry manager at the Brazil office of the World Resources Institute, also noted that “ambitious plans and efforts, such as Planaveg, require investment and political commitment, and therefore need legal and institutional security.” On top of the weakening of the socioenvironmental agenda during the Bolsonaro years, she said that “progress in prioritizing areas for restoration and in allocating and leveraging resources for their implementation has been timid.”
“Aspects such as the engagement and representation of the different sectors and subnational governments, as well as the reactivation of Conaveg, with the participation of restoration collectives, provide new momentum to steer the country toward a more just transition that protects and restores its ecosystems,” Oliveira said.
COP16: Between small advances and many frustrations
COP16 ended in some confusion when the summit’s chair, Colombian Environment Minister Susana Muhamad, suspended the meeting for lack of a quorum on Nov. 2, a day after the official deadline. It was the first biodiversity conference since the signing of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) at COP15 in Montreal, Canada, as a follow-up to the commitments of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
With 23 targets, this agreement aims to halt the accelerating process of global biodiversity loss by 2030. By then, signatory countries have committed to protect at least 30% of marine and terrestrial ecosystems through protected areas, in a target popularly known as 30×30. Another target 2 includes a commitment to restore at least 30% of the planet’s degraded areas.
To get this complex agenda implemented, one of the key issues at COP16 involved negotiating financing. Goal 19 of the GBF states that public and private institutions, both national and international, must contribute to the maintenance of the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund, managed by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), to which at least $200 billion must be allocated by 2030.
The agreement is to raise $20 billion a year by 2025, and $30 billion a year by 2030, so that developing countries can reach their targets. However, to the general frustration of the COP16 participants, less than $500 million was pledged in Cali. A source from the Brazilian Ministry of Environment and Climate Change pointed out that more than 3,000 companies took part in the event and that there was no articulation from the business sector in this context.
Nevertheless, the Brazilian government highlighted some progress, including its TFFF initiative, which drew the support of five countries — Germany, Colombia, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia and Norway — for the conservation of tropical forests. Negotiations on this and other issues that made some headway in Cali will be finalized at the COP30 climate conference that Brazil will host in the Amazonian city of Belém in 2025.
“The TFFF fund offers innovative, large-scale financial incentives for developing countries to conserve their tropical rainforests, paying a fixed annual amount per hectare of conserved and restored forest,” Marina Silva, Brazil’s environment minister, said at an event on Oct. 28 with representatives from countries that support the fund.
One of the most encouraging decisions for the social movements, which had a strong presence in Cali, was the creation of a permanent Indigenous subsidiary body to subsidize decision-making by the CBD Secretariat, as well as the recognition of the importance of Afro-descendant peoples in biodiversity conservation. The Cali Fund was also established to compensate Indigenous peoples and local communities for their traditional knowledge of biodiversity, as provided for in the CBD.
These achievements are the result of the strong articulation of representatives of these groups at COP16, especially the demonstration of strength with the creation of the G9 of the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon. This new social power seeks to work together to assert Indigenous peoples’ rights in this region of great socioenvironmental and cultural importance, which involves nine countries, including claiming the co-chair of COP30.
Banner image: Seedlings destined for Conservation International-Brazil’s restoration projects in southern Bahia. Image courtesy of Conservation International/Flavio Forner.
This story was first published here in Portuguese on Nov. 6, 2024.
Citation:
Williams, B. A., Beyer, H. L., Fagan, M. E., Chazdon, R. L., Schmoeller, M., Sprenkle-Hyppolite, S., … Crouzeilles, R. (2024). Global potential for natural regeneration in deforested tropical regions. Nature, 1-7. doi:10.1038/s41586-024-08106-4
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