Building the Future: Indigenous Peoples Learning How to ‘Plant’ Forests
August/September, 2024 – In addition to preventing deforestation in the Amazon, Indigenous lands have contributed to restoring the forest in regions where native vegetation has been destroyed. Planting seedlings brings back local biodiversity and promotes the recovery of ecosystem services, including water supply and carbon sequestration from the atmosphere.
One of these projects is being developed at the Kanela Indigenous Land, in the state of Maranhão—a region where the Amazon borders another biome, the Cerrado. One of the goals is recovering the spring that forms the Côhkahhàc, a marsh that covers part of the Escalvado village, and that represents an important source of food (that is, fish) for local Indigenous communities.
Several activities and workshops have been developed to reinforce forest restoration efforts and promote the exchange of experiences and learning under the project named Alliance of Indigenous Peoples for the Forests of Eastern Amazon: Conserve, Protect, and Restore. This project is supported by USAID and run by the Indigenist Work Center (CTI), together with the Society, Population, and Nature Institute (ISPN) and in partnership with Indigenous organizations.
In Brazil, Indigenous lands provide one of the main protections against the advance of deforestation: indeed, Indigenous lands have lost only 1 percent of their native vegetation area over the past 30 years (or 1.1 million hectares), while unprotected regions lost almost 21 percent. This data has been released by MapBiomas, a collaborative Brazilian network formed by non-governmental organizations, universities, and tech companies that produces land-cover and land-use mapping.
Building the Future – In one of the forest restoration workshops held at the Escalvado village in July, Indigenous Peoples received guidance on how to implement the project, with an emphasis on seedling production and spring recovery.
These actions were among the demands presented by participants during the Timbira Environmental Agents Training Program and the mapping expeditions (learn more here).
The importance of restoring the Côhkahhàc headwaters led 20 people—including men, women, and young people, fully supported by the whole community—to create a group and set up a nursery for the production of seedlings. The nursery occupies a shaded area of 100 m² in a 600-m² fenced lot.
Indigenous Peoples hold workshops on substrate production, seed collection, and soil sample collection for complete chemical analysis. The focus is the production and planting of native fruit seedlings and other species of plants and shrubs with greater potential for spring recovery.
The project represents a significant step toward environmental conservation and sustainability in Indigenous lands, reaffirming the Kanela Memortumré community's commitment to the protection and restoration of their territory.