There is no shortcut to restoring a forest. There is a path.
Hello again.
You may not remember, but in 2022 we were here, on this very page, to introduce ourselves: “re.green is a Brazilian company created to restore tropical forests, permanently capture carbon, and recover and conserve robust biodiversity.” We said this before we had planted a single tree.
Four years later, on our fifth anniversary, we return to show what we have done since – and to tell you what we have learned.
We started with an idea, and began by looking for those who would stand beside us. The last time we were here, we were a team of around ten, including investors. Today, re.green is a team of more than 100 driven, courageous, and talented professionals. In our commercial and financial partnerships, we’ve signed contracts with leading companies across technology, agriculture, food, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, and oil and gas – alongside international and domestic capital, including a landmark structured loan from Brazil’s Climate Fund (BNDES – Brazilian Development Bank), later honored with Environmental Finance’s 2025 Award for Innovation in Loan Structure (Americas). Beyond debt, we also count on private and multilateral players committed to investing in equity, reinforcing the diversity and strength of our capital base.
We also found land to restore. Between our own areas, partnerships with individuals and companies who see the value of the restoration market, and public concessions, we’re now committed to 100,000 hectares — an area nearly the size of the city of Rio de Janeiro — with more than 30,000 hectares already in active restoration, where pasture, degradation, and bare earth give way to forest once more.
To restore a forest, we must build trust with those who live around it, because restoring a territory also means generating income, strengthening communities, protecting ways of life, and sustaining long-term relationships – building, with our projects’ neighbors, paths for the standing forest to also become financial prosperity, for decades to come. Local knowledge is one of the technologies of restoration: through fire-brigade training, the development of sustainable forest products, and the gathering of fruits and seeds, in re.green’s first five years we have become part of the livelihoods of more than 45,000 people, taking direct part in generating over R$10 million in income for 22 communities and building a network that flourishes in the economy of the standing forest.
With communities involved, we can start to restore the forest. Not just any forest, and not a small one. We have already planted 10 million native seedlings and dispersed 400 million seeds across six states and two Brazilian biomes: the Atlantic Forest and the Amazon. But a forest flourishing in biodiversity is far more than planting trees. Each day, more birds scatter seeds, more animals move about, more plants feed pollinators, more water returns to the atmosphere, and more greenhouse gases are captured.
What we are doing is a profitable business that helps recreate, across thousands of hectares, biological systems in which every part — fauna, flora, and fungi; water, wind, and air — interacts. Our aim is to scale not by simplifying, but by generating ecologically complex landscapes, where the interactions of everything with everything, too many to count, can never be fully worked out on a drawing board.
But as for what can be counted: this year we issued our first carbon credits. 120,000 carbon credits (CRUs) — each representing the removal of one metric ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In this vintage, some are restoration credits from the Amazon, and some are the first CRUs ever generated by restoration with native species in the Atlantic Forest, Brazil’s most threatened biome.
Over these five years, we have confirmed something that traditional peoples, in their reciprocity with the natural world, have long known. We are co-creators of the forest: we help create the conditions for it to exist and we facilitate its processes, but we do not replace nature. We are here so that it can act in time for us to benefit from what it does.
Not every seedling takes, not every seed sprouts, so we need to keep moving — which is why science and monitoring matter so much in telling us whether we are on the right path. What is essential is to keep acting with quality and scale, until one day the forest no longer needs us. As one of our scientists puts it: “The most important tree is not the one we planted — it’s the one the bird brought. Because it means the forest is behaving as a forest.”
Our activities and our learnings have led us to a new concept: Total Forest Stewardship. We assess the landscape as a whole and assist nature so that, with its infinite capacity for complexity and connection, it can recover. The emphasis falls not on planting, nor on any single action, but on the system. We act to serve the landscape — the wider whole — and to restore nature’s mastery in guiding its own processes.
It is in this sense, in fact, that scale matters. Small forested areas will always be less complex than large expanses, because they contain fewer ecological interactions. The smaller the web of connections, the poorer the system.
An example. In 2022, we wrote:
R tor tions a e ot l al e. here the hap en a es the ffe e ce.
The sentence, from which we removed 30% of its letters, is almost unintelligible. It stops working as language.
With forest fragments, the effect is much the same. With too many gaps, the system loses its meaning. Hence the emphasis we place on landscape-scale restoration, where connections multiply and come into focus. We work to restore the immense conversation a forest holds with itself.
Restored, the sentence reads:
Restorations are not all alike. Where they happen makes the difference.
Returning the letters — returning nature — where there were gaps — pastures and degraded woods — is what restores integrity to the whole, and brings it back to health. In five years, we have begun to form, in southern Bahia, an ecological corridor that reconnects forest fragments: the Ondina-Surubim Ecological Corridor, a mosaic of neighboring properties whose woods, until then torn apart, formed — ecologically speaking — a system as broken as the damaged sentence. There are nearly 12,000 hectares of restored area within the corridor, and 31,000 hectares once you include the surrounding forests that connect the region. That is a landscape five times the size of the island of Manhattan — one Manhattan for each year of re.green’s existence.
We believe native forests are the best solution to the climate crisis. For their scale, cost, permanence, and social and environmental co-benefits, there is no technology more powerful against this emergency than a landscape assembling itself back into a forest. Once restored, a forest does more than draw greenhouse gases from the air: it regulates rainfall, purifies water, restores biodiversity, stabilizes slopes, enriches the soil, tempers the heat, restores the flow of rivers, cleans the air, and enriches all around it.
Our clients do not come just for the carbon credits. They come for the forest. It increasingly makes sense to think of it as green infrastructure — a necessary base on which other activities thrive — comparable, in its benefits, to sectors where the upfront investment is high and the returns extend predictably over decades, like highways, transmission lines, and renewable energy.
Brazil is ready to lead the world’s response to the climate crisis: it sits in the planet’s tropical belt, where trees grow faster than almost anywhere else; it holds a robust system of science and technology; and it is steadily advancing public policies that foster the economy of the standing forest.
re.green is proof of this. Today we are a world leader in restoration, both in scale and in the knowledge we produce: large-scale projects already well underway, a readiness to take part in valuable public-private partnerships — such as the concession we won to restore the Bom Futuro National Forest, in the Amazon — and science and technology running through everything we do. In November 2025 we won the Earthshot Prize, the most prestigious international award for environmental initiatives that stand out for innovation and impact.
This is the path we have traced so far. We will keep restoring at scale —following nature’s time to meet humanity’s urgency. We trust that it is possible to keep tracing a new path for humanity’s relationship with the natural world.
We have changed a great deal since we came here to introduce ourselves. What remains the same is the conviction with which we said goodbye in 2022. For us, the last paragraph of that text remains as alive and as new as the forests that, at this very moment, are re.greening where not even pasture would grow:
For the past 10,000 years, humankind has created wealth by exploiting natural resources. re.green’s essential ambition is to show we can create wealth not by obliterating nature, but by reviving it.
We’re doing it.
re.green · verb ·
to turn green again
to give or regain vigor; to revitalize
to gain new strength
to bring back to memory; to recall
