Forests absorb carbon, shelter wildlife, and anchor watersheds — yet billions of trees have been lost to logging and land conversion. This archive tracks the science, policy, and community efforts driving reforestation forward, from Indigenous-led land restoration to large-scale planting programs showing measurable results.
The Amazon Fund launched in 2009, when Brazil built a public finance mechanism that paid for verified reductions in rainforest loss rather than promises. Managed by the national development bank and backed early by Norway, it has since supported more than 115 projects across the Amazon Biome. It became an influential model for paying to keep forests standing.
Jaú National Park was created by government decree in September 1980, drawing a protective boundary around 2.3 million hectares of Amazon rainforest in Brazil — an area roughly the size of Slovenia. The park safeguards an entire blackwater river basin, jaguars and giant otters, and one of Earth’s most intact tropical ecosystems.
In 1662, English writer John Evelyn stood before London’s Royal Society and warned that England’s forests were vanishing under the weight of shipbuilding, iron-smelting, and careless felling. His paper Sylva called not just for restraint but for active replanting — one of the earliest formal Western arguments that nature must be tended, not simply taken.
