ANTONINA, Brazil — In the southern Brazilian state of Paraná, the small coastal town of Antonina gets abundant and high-quality water for its nearly 20,000 inhabitants from a nearby water reserve, one of three that the NGO Wildlife Research and Environmental Education Society (SPVS) established to help bring back biodiversity and water security to degraded areas. To anyone visiting the reserves, it’s difficult to imagine that these thriving forests covering some 19,000 hectares (47,000 acres) were vast voids of buffalo pasture just two decades ago. Today, nearly the entire area has been restored using dozens of native tree species, and SPVS’s work is ongoing in the seedling nursery, providing an example that it’s possible to repair the degraded natural world. These tiny tree seedlings are destined to become towering forests in Paraná, Brazil. Image by Ellen Nemitz for Mongabay. SPVS founder Clóvis Ricardo Schrappe Borges said that while the restoration project is still in progress, it has already resulted in several boons for the region. In addition to increasing water security, the reserves’ vegetation captures carbon from the atmosphere and provides surrounding towns with revenue from a tax policy called Ecological ICMS, which financially compensates municipalities for establishing reserves, sustainable use areas and Indigenous territories. The three water reserves are part of an overarching protected area called the Atlantic Forest Great Reserve, an area encompassing 2.7 million hectares (6.7 million acres) of land and another 2.2 million hectares (5.4 million acres) of marine habitat in the states of Paraná, Santa…This article was originally published on Mongabay
Início » Organizations tackle droughts, floods in Brazil by planting forests
