Brazil's blueprint for reforestation
Source: The Guardian
Brazil's blueprint for reforestation
Jonathan Watts in Miguel Pereira
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 12 June 2012 12.53 BST
The misty forests of Miguel Pereira, just two hours drive from Rio's Copacabana beaches, show the scars of development. Over the past century, this part of the Atlantic forest has experienced three waves of development – logging, coffee plantations and cattle ranching – each of which ran down the environment a step further.
By 2008, there was almost nothing left to extract. The hills were stripped bare, the rivers dry and the soil degraded. Local people were left in poverty. Many moved to Rio to find work.
But now they are returning because Miguel Pereira is once again frontier territory and is being held up as a model in a new global campaign to revitalise 150 million hectares – six times the area of the UK – of degraded land around the planet by 2020. The success story at Miguel Pereira will also be food for thought for ministers and heads of state from around the globe attending the Rio+20 summit next week on sustainable development.
One aim of that meeting is to forge a global "green economy" from the ruins of the financial crisis and the Miguel Pereira experiment shows how environmental investments can also reduce poverty. It has done this through sustainable agriculture, renewable energy and a move away from GDP as a main measure of national wellbeing.
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Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jun/12/brazil-treeplanting-reforestation-logging
