The Nature Conservancy's Plant a Billion Trees campaign is a large scale reforestation effort to restore and plant one billion trees by 2015 in Brazil's Atlantic Forest, one of the greatest repositories of biodiversity on Earth. To learn more and help us plant trees, visit http://www.plantabillion.org
To bring the Atlantic Forest back from the brink of extinction, over eighty environmental organizations, private companies, governments, researchers, and landowners launched in the Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact.
The initiative will promote large-scale forest restoration by coordinating, integrating, and increasing the scale of all restoration initiatives in the Atlantic Forest and also help to protect the existing forest remnants in priority areas for biodiversity conservation.
The Conservancy and many partner organizations have been working during the last two years to develop a vision, set priorities, develop strategies, and generate some key products to support the Restoration Pact. Working groups composed of staff from several institutions were established to develop and implement priority activities and generate the first outcomes of the Pact. The Pact is one of TNC’s priorities and considers the Plant a Billion Tree campaign as one of the main strategy to raise funding to support restoration projects on the ground.
Why restore the Atlantic Forest?
The loss of forest cover and the highly fragmented forest remnants are major threats to the rich diversity and endemism of flora and fauna in the Atlantic Forest. To reverse the cycle of degradation, maintain the integrity of the biodiversity, and promote the protection and supply of ecosystem services to millions of people that live and depend on the Atlantic Forest, large scale restoration efforts are urgent and needed,” said Miguel Calmon, the Coordinator of the Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact and director of the Conservancy’s forest carbon work in Latin America.
During the last two years a team of GIS and Remote Sensing experts from the partner organizations mapped the potential areas for restoration in the entire Atlantic Forest. Even though the goal of the Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact is to restore 37 million acres, more than 40 million acres of degraded lands were mapped during this major effort.
