From his vantage point at the top of the hill where he grew up, Luiz Alberto Nunes dos Santos gazes down at the city below. White apartment blocks are nestled among mountains covered with luxuriant vegetation. The statue of Christ the Redeemer and Sugarloaf Mountain appear through gaps in the trees. The sea is just about visible in the distance.
Rio de Janeiro’s striking blend of urban infrastructure and tropical jungle, cradled between granite peaks and the sea, earned the city Unesco world heritage status in 2012. Yet few people realise that the verdant forests cloaking Rio’s dramatic hills are largely the result of human intervention.
“None of this was here before. Nothing, zero trees,” says Santos, motioning towards the woods surrounding Tavares Bastos, a small favela clinging to a hill that overlooks Guanabara Bay. The 40-year-old, who uses the name Leleco, planted some of those trees himself as part of a pioneering reforestation project run by the municipal government.
Leleco initially got involved with the project because he needed a job. Twenty years on, he leads three small teams to maintain and enrich restored forests at Tavares Bastos and two other sites. It’s challenging work that involves toiling away in the heat, scrambling up steep slopes with delicate seedlings and constantly weeding invasive non-native species such as bamboo. Still, Leleco couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
“I feel responsible when I look at all this, how it was before and how it is now. I see birds that weren’t here before, animals that have come back into the forest, and I think, boy, I’m a part of all this,” he says, with a hint of pride.
The programme, known today as Refloresta Rio (Reforest Rio), was set up by the city government in 1986. By 2019, it had transformed the city’s landscape, having trained 15,000 local workers like Leleco, who have planted 10m seedlings across 3,462 hectares (8,500 acres) – roughly 10 times the area of New York’s Central Park.
Reforested sites include mangroves and vegetation-covered sandbars called restinga, as well as wooded mountainsides around favelas.
Over time, some sites have been abandoned due to the disengagement of the local community or security concerns linked to the violence widespread in Rio’s favelas. But the overall programme has outlived nearly a dozen mayoral administrations and can now be considered a public policy, advocates say.
“It fluctuates, but we have about 100 [active] sites all over the city, some in safer areas, others in very violent areas,” says Peterson Santos Silva, the project’s coordinator at city hall. That number includes around 30 sites reforested in partnership with private companies, a parallel initiative launched in 2011.
“I know of no other project in the world, run by a municipal government, that is as big as the Refloresta Rio project,” says Richieri Sartori, a professor of biological sciences at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio).
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Spread over 17 states that are home to 72% of the country’s population, the Atlantic forest is the most devastated ecosystem in Brazil. According to the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), only 12.4% of the native forest remains – 80% of it in private areas – after devastation due to urban expansion and exploitation of brazilwood, sugar cane, gold and coffee since the arrival of the Portuguese in 1500.
In a country where biomes such as the Amazon and the Pantanal are burning to make way for agriculture and cattle, and wildfires can also break out in urban areas, as happened recently near Tijuca national park, recovering the Atlantic forest is a sign that something different is under way in Rio.
A city of 6.2 million people, Rio has a long history of replanting the native Atlantic forest. During water shortages in 1862, Emperor Dom Pedro II ordered the reforestation of the Tijuca coastal massif to restore its springs. This is considered the world’s first tropical reforestation initiative. The Tijuca forest is now a 3.5-sq km national park in the city’s heart.
More recently, the abrupt granite inclines of Sugarloaf, a landmark that juts out into the sea, were reforested in the 1970s.
Restoring urban forests brings myriad environmental and human benefits. These include encouraging biodiversity to flourish, helping regulate water supply, reducing erosion risk by strengthening the soil, and diminishing the urban heat island effect.
This feels particularly pressing as Brazil grapples with increasingly severe and frequent heatwaves and wildfires. In September, thermometers in Rio registered 41.1C (110F), a new record for the winter months.
“I think it would be impossible to survive in Rio, considering current temperatures, if it weren’t for all the reforested areas,” says Sartori, who has studied the benefits greener areas bring to the city.
Still, when Refloresta Rio was launched in the 1980s, conservation was not the issue it is today, never mind climate mitigation and adaptation. The city government did not even have an environment secretariat at the time. Back then, the programme targeted craggy areas around favelas, intending to reduce the risk of landslides and prevent informal settlements from spreading to structurally dangerous slopes.
Under pressure to deliver visible results quickly, technicians used a limited number of fast-growing, non-native species. The project’s older sites are now undergoing a process of “floristic enrichment” to increase their biodiversity, says forest engineer Claudia França as she walks through young inga and mimosa trees on the Serra da Posse in Rio’s west zone. More than 100 different Atlantic forest species have been planted here.
“Today we work with completely different techniques and we favour native species,” says França, who joined city hall and the reforestation programme in 1996. “The science has improved since.”
Although the initial concerns with reducing soil erosion and providing work for favela residents remain, the project has evolved to reflect a growing understanding of ecosystem restoration as a tool for fighting the climate crisis.
Municipal workers are particularly enthusiastic about Refloresta Rio’s potential to improve wellbeing and provide environmental education in communities far from the city’s postcard views, which tend to be the first victims of climate injustice.
Fires used to be a huge problem on the Serra da Posse, which, like most degraded areas in Rio, was overrun with a tall, invasive and highly flammable grass called capim colonião. Usually lit by local people burning rubbish, fires would spread and consume newly planted saplings, to the exasperation of the reforestation workers.
But Denivam Souza, the forest engineer in charge of the area, has noticed a gradual change in attitudes.
“People get really upset with fires now. The whole hill used to catch fire in the past. Now it’s maybe 5% in the area we haven’t touched, but people get more upset – because now, they have a sense of belonging,” says Souza, who sports a big smile and a T-shirt with the project’s tree-shaped logo.
Getting the community on board is not always easy, but the main challenge, he says, is a lack of resources. As one of city hall’s 15 technical professionals, he is stretched thin managing more than a dozen sites in western Rio. He would like to see the local workers on whom the programme depends being paid better – most earn just over 1,000 reais (£139) a month, less than the minimum wage of 1,412 reais, and they have the status of paid volunteers, without the benefits of formal employment.
“This is not just for the local community,” says Souza, sheltering in the shade of an inga tree. “It’s for the whole city, for all the Atlantic forest and, when you think about it, for the whole world. We’re capturing carbon, fighting climate change – and it all starts with the local team.”
