Tag Archive for: South America

Brazil’s Blueprint for Reforestation

Author: Jonathan Watts

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.

The Rio city government, water utility, corporate sponsors and environmental NGOs have started to pay for ecological services – clean air, fresh water, fertile soil and carbon sinks – that are provided by forest restoration.

Local landowners get an annual income of 60 Reals (around £19) per hectare and villagers are paid for planting saplings and maintaining the canopy at four sites in the region.

Three years in, the results are visually impressive. More than 950 hectares of formerly brown and barren hillsides are once again lush with the native species of the Atlantic forest, such as yellow flowering Araguaney and fast-growing Angico Artemisiana – some of which are almost 10 metres tall.

For conservationists, this is good news because it strengthens the Tinguá Bocaina corridor – one of the world’s great biodiversity hotspots. The city of Rio benefits from carbon sequestration and the maintenance of the Guandu watershed, which supplies 80% of the water to the metropolitan area and 30% of its energy.

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26 Regeneration Initiatives in Latin America

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In May (2016), over 50 people from across Mexico participated in a Regrarians training session in Sierra Gorda de Querétaro, México. The 10-day training session was led by Darren Doherty, a fifth-generation Bendigo region farmer, developer, author and trainer. Doherty has been involved in the design and development of nearly 2000 projects across six continents, in close to 50 countries.

I was fortunate to represent Regeneration International (RI) in this training session, which focused on practical methods for regenerating, restoring, rehabilitating, rekindling and rebooting landscapes.

The meeting brought together a diverse group of people, including permaculture practitioners who produce food in urban Mexico City,  ranchers working with cattle to restore vast expanses of desertified land in Chihuahua, consultants using keyline design as well as gabions, trincheras and berms to regenerate watersheds and small-scale farmers employing permaculture principles.

The key take away? Regenerative agriculture requires a combination of small-scale and large-scale solutions encompassing  a wide variety of practices and approaches. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. But all regenerative land use and agriculture solutions have one thing in common: They are geared toward restoring soil health and improving land in ways that ultimately lead to to productive landscapes and healthy communities and economies.

Following the training session, we compiled this list of 26 regeneration initiatives in Latin America.

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Alexandra Groome is Campaign & Events Coordinator for Regeneration International, a project of the Organic Consumers Association.

In the Pastures of Colombia, Cows, Crops and Timber Coexist

Author: Lisa Palmer

Over the last two decades, cattle rancher Carlos Hernando Molina has replaced 220 acres of open pastureland with trees, shrubs, and bushy vegetation. But he hasn’t eliminated the cows. Today, his land in southwestern Colombia more closely resembles a perennial nursery at a garden center than a grazing area. Native, high-value timber like mahogany and samanea grow close together along the perimeter of the pasture. The trees are strung with electric wire and act as live fences. In the middle of the pen grow leucaena trees, a protein-packed forage tree, and beneath the leucaena are three types of tropical grasses and groundcover such as peanuts.

The plants provide his 90 head of cattle with vertical layers of grazing, leading to twice the milk and meat production per acre while reducing the amount of land needed to raise them. His operation is part of a trend globally to sustainably coax more food from each acre — without chemicals and fertilizers — while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, increasing biodiversity, and enhancing the land’s ability to withstand the effects of climate change.

Livestock and their food needs take up 30 percent of land globally, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. In Colombia, where cattle occupy 80 percent of agricultural area, pastures have contributed to soil degradation and deforestation and, in dry areas, have hastened desertification, according to Julián Chará, a researcher at the Center for Research in Sustainable Systems of Agriculture, CIPAV, in Cali, Colombia. But a new paradigm is emerging. Land conservation is happening alongside livestock production.

In Colombia, Molina’s brand of so-called “sustainable intensification” is the favored agroforestry practice for livestock production. Agroforestry cultivates trees with food crops or livestock, while farmers make use of the trees’ ecological benefits. Plantains grow above shade-loving coffee. Valuable hardwoods like oak grow in alleys next to corn and wheat.

“People don’t think of ranching when they think of agroforestry,” says David Cleary, strategy director for agriculture at The Nature Conservancy. “But what is happening in Colombia is a reminder that you have to have a broader definition of agroforestry and make it work with any number of agricultural systems. In Colombia, silvopastoral systems are favored because they can work for both smallholder farms as well as large, private-sector-style ranching.”

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Could Eating Less Meat INCREASE Greenhouse Gas Emissions?

Author: Kathy Voth

OK – We’ve all heard it. Eating less meat is better for the planet. Why? Well, there’s research showing that 1) meat production has a big carbon footprint; and 2) ruminants emit lots of methane in farts, burps and manure and this is a problem because methane is an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But like most things in life, this is a complex issue, and the results of recent research indicate that at least in one region of the world, eating less meat might increase global greenhouse gas emissions.

According to research by University researchers at Scotland’s Rural College and the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, reducing beef production in the Brazilian Cerrado could increase global greenhouse gas emissions. Lead researcher Rafael Silva explains the reasons this way:

“Much of Brazil’s grassland is in poor condition, leading to low beef productivity and high greenhouse gas emissions from cattle. However, increasing demand for meat provides an incentive for farmers to recover degraded pastures. This would boost the amount of carbon stored in the soil and increase cattle productivity. It would require less land for grazing and reduce deforestation, potentially lowering emissions.”

The findings published in the January issue of the journal Nature Climate Change indicate that if demand for beef is 30 per cent higher by 2030 compared with current estimates, net emissions would decrease by 10 per cent. Reducing demand by 30 per cent would lead to 9 per cent higher emissions, provided the deforestation rates are not altered by a higher demand.

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