Residents of Maracaçumé, an impoverished town on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, are baffled by the company that recently purchased the largest ranch in the region. How can you make money by planting trees that will never be cut down, on pastures where cattle have been grazing for decades?
“We are ending the pastures that many farmers need,” said Josias Araújo, a former cowboy who now works in reforestation. “Everything is strange.”
The reforestation company, Araújo’s patron, is Re.green. Together with other companies, it aims to create an industry that makes standing trees, which store planet-warming carbon, more lucrative than the biggest driver of deforestation: livestock farming.
About a fifth of the rainforest has already disappeared. And scientists warn that rising global temperatures could push the entire ecosystem, a crucial regulator of the world’s climate, toward collapse in the coming decades unless deforestation is stopped and an area the size of Germany is restored.
Re.green plans to restore trees in deforested areas and sell credits for the carbon they store. Companies then use those credits to offset their greenhouse gases in emissions accounting. But conservationists worry that companies that want to appear environmentally conscious could abuse carbon credits and continue using fossil fuels.
Still, reforestation projects have generated comments in the northern Amazon. “People who manage cattle don’t care much about this reforestation thing,” said Anderson Pina Farias, a rancher whose farm is largely deforested. But, he added, “if selling carbon is better than livestock farming, we can change business.”
The weather appears to be helping restaurant businesses win the hearts and minds of the region.
José Villeigagnon Rabelo is the Mayor of Mãe do Rio. A drought fueled by climate change and deforestation has recently dried up much of the grass that ranchers use for food. And after decades of pounding hooves, millions of hectares have become so degraded that they cannot provide much nourishment. “The cattle are starving,” Rabelo said.
But a year ago, a restoration company called Mombak began a 3,000-hectare project on one of the largest ranches in the region. Rabelo says he hopes the industry offers the community a lifeline.
According to a 2023 BloombergNEF report, carbon markets could be worth $1 trillion by 2037, twice what the global beef market, which encompasses vast tracts of rainforest, is now worth.
Growing a large, biodiverse forest on degraded land can cost tens of millions of dollars. But companies looking to burnish their climate credentials are increasingly willing to spend more to finance projects.
Microsoft bought a Mombak project and Re.green says it hopes to announce buyers soon. The two companies have raised about $200 million from investors — including pension funds, the Development Bank of Brazil and global asset managers.
The efforts still face major challenges. The supply of seeds for native trees is a bottleneck, and finding farms to buy can take months of research. Investigations have also revealed that some projects exaggerated the impact of their emissions.
Experts warn that displaced livestock could continue to drive deforestation elsewhere and that wildfires could erase the benefits of trees.
“It looks like carbon finance can make a difference,” said Barbara Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project in California, which has researched forestry carbon projects. But, she added, “trading forest carbon for fossil fuel emissions is problematic.” That’s partly because buying carbon credits could be less expensive than shifting a company away from dirty energy sources, which scientists say the world must ultimately do to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
Djalma Soares, a rancher who works on land adjacent to the Re.green project in Maracaçumé, said that, although he still loves his cattle, he cannot deny that the idea of bringing life back to the forest is “beautiful.” Seeing his neighbors working to address that, he said, is inspiring. “We see that it is the future.”
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