Brazil has 1 million hectares of forests to restore in rural settlements resulting from the agrarian reform

Restoring 1 million hectares of Permanent Preservation Areas (APPs), combining agroforestry production and natural regeneration in rural settlements. This is the proposal of Instituto Escolhas, which points out two strategies: implement Agroforestry Systems (SAFs) in 500 thousand hectares of APP with low and medium natural restoration potential and carry out the passive recovery of another 500 thousand hectares with high recovery potential.

“By investing in forest recovery in settlements, Brazil can generate more than 238 thousand jobs in the implementation and management stages of agroforestry systems. According to the research, while the forest grows, the country can produce further 43.1 million tons of food within 1 million hectares of rural settlements resulting from the agrarian reform”, argues Patricia Pinheiro, project manager at Escolhas and responsible for research coordination.

To reach these figures, Escolhas reviewed 7,884 rural settlements, totaling 45.11 million hectares where 809.4 thousand households are registered. This accounts for 83.4% of the settlements in the country, out of a total of 9,447 settlements. The data is an excerpt from the research The good results from forest recovery: from investment to benefits. The research calculated the investment required to restore 12 million hectares, which is the Brazilian forestry restoration target undertaken in the Paris Agreement.

The study also showed that the US$ 11.7 billion investments in settlements’ SAFs over 30 years will likely generate US$ 32.2 billion in net revenue and remove 99.6 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere.

Read the document here.