March 13, 2024
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Apple's Restoration Fund Plants New Roots in the Atlantic Forest
Restoration Fund projects in South America are reforesting land one seedling at a time.
Many people in the Atlantic Forest of South America say that their lives depend on their mother, the superior matriarch who provides for everything. This is true for plants, animals, and even trees that tower above, reaching up into the sky toward the sun, providing shade for creatures living in the undergrowth.
It is estimated that there are 5,000 species of trees in the Atlantic Forest today. Two-thirds of those species are at risk of extinction due to centuries of exploitation and extractive practices. Restoration of rainforests, which could represent 100 million acres of restored areas in Brazil alone, has been a central focus of Apple-supported projects in the region. This includes a project inland in Trancoso, a coastal town in Bahia, Brazil, where a company is farming rainforest. seedlings mother treeIt is the most resilient tree of various species that has survived the destruction of tropical rainforests.
“We started with the best possible genetic material harvested from the vast natural reserves of the Atlantic Rainforest,” explains Bruno Mariani, founder and CEO of forest management and investment company Symbiosis. “That will attract a lot of animals and insects.”
Established in 2008, Symbiosis has been collecting, storing, and planting seeds from mother trees of various native Brazilian species since 2010. “The mother tree is everything to us, as it symbolizes nature, which provides us with all our energy and the basis for recovery,” says Mickael Mello, plant nursery manager at Symbiosis.
Symbiosis is one of three investments that are part of Apple's Restore Fund announced in 2021 with the goal of scaling nature-based solutions to combat climate change. In partnership with Goldman Sachs and Conservation International, the Restore Fund has invested in three carbon removal projects across Brazil and Paraguay with the goal of delivering benefits far beyond carbon, from strengthening local livelihoods to improving biodiversity.
Since the first planting, consisting of 160 different species spread across an area that will be permanently protected from timber harvest, Symbiosis has scaled up the restoration of threatened native trees. In an effort to reduce biodiversity loss, Symbiosis has committed to conserving 40% of its land as native, species-diverse forests and sourcing the remaining land from precious tropical hardwoods from responsibly managed resources. After creating 800 hectares of biodiversity forest land over 10 years, the company has ambitions to plant more than 1 million seedlings across 1,000 hectares in 2024 alone.
“Trees work in groups, almost like a network,” says Mariani. “They are social beings and want to help each other. “Depending on the species, their roots depend on the depth of the soil, so they cooperate rather than compete.”
The Atlantic Forest is located along the eastern coast of South America, starting in northeastern Brazil and extending further inland down to southeastern Paraguay and northern Argentina. It is only 40 miles wide at its northernmost point and extends about 200 miles inland from the southern Atlantic coastline. After more than 500 years of deforestation, 80 percent of the rainforest has been depleted, and the landscape has been farmed for agriculture, growing coffee, cacao, sugarcane and other crops. And it is used as pasture for livestock. Much of the rainforest has been depleted of valuable hardwoods, including Brazilwood and Brazilian rosewood, which are used in furniture, construction and even musical instruments such as guitars. Similar activity is taking place on Amazon today.
Estimates place the potential reforestation area of the Atlantic Forest at about 40 million hectares, or 100 million acres. Symbiosis' approach to forestry aims to create high-quality, sustainable working forests while fighting climate change using one of the most important tools for carbon sequestration: nature itself. “We are balancing wood production with carbon stocks,” explains Alan Batista, Chief Financial Officer of Symbiosis, who studies forestry and has a background in plant breeding, business strategy, economics and finance in the pulp and paper industry. .
“Woody biomass actually produces a lot of the carbon that is stored here, and we know that there is a lot of carbon stored in the soil as well,” says Batista. “So when it comes to harvest, you have to think about the cycle from beginning to end. The management applied here is continuous cover forest management, meaning permanent management. “It will always be covered with forests in the future.”
Symbiosis created maps of land cover, land cover change, and forest carbon by integrating satellite data, ecological knowledge, and machine learning from Space Intelligence to calculate carbon stored in land. Satellite data is integrated with readings from the ForestScanner app to take field measurements with your iPhone's LiDAR scanner to determine age and growth rate. “They are helping us examine properties and land use: pastures, forest cover, retroactive deforestation, etc.,” explains Batista.
Part of the screening process is to identify areas designated as lands belonging to indigenous communities. Symbiosis hopes to soon collaborate to identify and collect seeds from mother trees on their land. Mariani was inspired after visiting the Amazon in 2007 and seeing how an indigenous community had reforested an area destroyed by loggers along the Peruvian border.
“The leaders talked to me about climate change and took me to places they had reforested. It originally looked like a forest,” Mariani recalls. “It was inspiring to me to see the power of natural restoration and how traditional knowledge and science can be combined.”
Just over 1,600 miles southwest of Trancoso, another Restoration Fund project is underway in Forestal Apepu, in the San Pedro region of Paraguay.
Forestal Apepu, a southwestern region of the Atlantic Forest, is developing fast-growing eucalyptus forests for high-quality wood production on land logged decades ago, while protecting remaining natural forests through experimental trials and planting native species. Forestal Apepu focuses on high-quality wood managed with longer growth cycles, allowing for greater carbon removal and long-term storage from forest lands. They also hope that sturdy wood products produced from high-quality wood will relieve pressure on the natural forests themselves, storing carbon in wood products that will have a long life even after the trees are cut down.
A key part of Forestal Apepu's work extends beyond the boundaries of the forest. The project is also supporting local communities through a series of social impact initiatives around San Estanislao, neighboring Paraguay.
Inland regions have depended on forests for timber, firewood and agricultural needs for generations. As part of the Apple Restoration Fund, Forestal Apepu is working with local communities to identify alternative sources of income to relieve pressure on timber forests in the area. These sources include employment at the company's Forest Stewardship Council-certified eucalyptus farms, land leasing through an external grower model (which provides seedlings and technical assistance for timber cultivation and management to smallholder landowners), and local women's associations. This includes chicken production and yerba mate. tillage.
Graciela Gimenez has lived in Cururu'o, a small community of about 1,200 people, for 40 years. Every morning she wakes up at 5 am to start her day. She feeds the chickens and changes their water, cleans the house, cooks her family's meals, and handles any job that may be needed for the women's association, which she founded and of which she is president. of.
“I have always been actively involved in the community,” says Gimenez. “They like that I have the power to push things forward.”
After several meetings with Gladys Nuñez, Forestal Apepu's social liaison, Gimenez and community women came together to develop a source of income through raising chickens. Previously, each household had inconsistent income, mainly from day labor on nearby land. After Forestal Apepu added 21 chickens to the coop in 2023, Gimenez now has 51 chickens that produce eggs and meat for her family to eat and sell.
“We must take care of our neighbors who are also our allies,” says Nuñez. “Everyone in the community working in Apepu, including myself, is learning every day about forest management, such as health and safety against pesticides and better use of natural resources. This learning as a community will benefit the environment.”
Ramon Mariotti, leader of the Palomita I community who settled in the Chaco region in 1962 after drought and devastation, said yerba mate, an herbal tea that is the only thirst quencher for many Paraguayans. (yerba mate) is grown in this area. . Mariotti's father taught him everything about growing, including when the leaves are ready, how delicately they should be picked by hand, how to dry and grind them, and how to decide what will sell best.
“Since we came here, we have realized how rich this land is,” says Mariotti. “It’s like having a natural supermarket all around us. “We can plant anything.”
To increase yields, Mariotti has been working with Forestal Apepu's Alberto Florentín to improve the planting process, including knowing when to plant and how close they should be to each other.
Florentín spent 40 years as a forestry engineer traveling throughout Paraguay. He first worked for the Forest Service, and then at the National Park Center for the Museo Moisés Bertoni, a nature reserve, where he helped recruit park rangers from the indigenous communities he encountered in the area. . The knowledge Florentín gained from his multiple visits to different parts of Paraguay gave him the ability to survive anywhere in Paraguay and help others thrive purely in this land.
“I want to make sure that people here can watch things grow and not leave a desert for future generations,” says Florentín. “Climate change has made things increasingly difficult. Water resources have become scarce and growing has become more difficult to find. So I want to make sure they have all the resources to continue to grow.”
In addition to community projects, Forestal Apepu is also looking at ways to monitor land conditions in forested areas.
Bioacoustic monitoring experiments are recording forest sounds to help partner teams of biologists use artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect levels of biodiversity across forests.
At Forestal Apepu's project sites in Paraguay and Symbiosis's project sites in Brazil, efforts to document, preserve and revitalize the flora and fauna of each region may seem disconnected, but with a mutual goal of digging beneath the surface and ensuring the resilience of our most natural places. Share. Things on Earth that have been taken for granted for too long.
Mariani of Symbiosis recognized this when he first started thinking about his company, and it ultimately solidified its name. “It is cooperation between different species pursuing mutual benefit. This is the opposite of a parasite. What I want to do is coexistence. “It’s a win-win for everyone.”
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