Tree Equity: Rehabilitating São Paulo’s Atlantic Forests and Communities

A green transformation is underway across São Paulo. Planted in schoolyards or community centers across densely populated low-income areas, pocket forests bring both much-needed nature and joy to the people in these communities. We transformed concrete courtyards and empty fields into lush native pocket forests and food gardens while restoring the highly-endangered Atlantic Forest in the process.

The forests become “living classrooms” for students to reconnect with nature and learn about native plants, while also offering much needed shaded areas for socializing and relaxation to the thousands of people who access the spaces on a daily basis.

Rafael Ribeiro is a SUGi Forest Maker and co-founder of the nonprofit formigas-de-embaúba. To learn more about the story behind these forests and their impact, we spoke to Rafael.

SUGi: Rafael, the Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest. Unfortunately, however, the word “deforestation” often conjures up images of the stark loss of rainforest that has occurred in the last half century. But what many people don’t know is that other parts of Brazil were also once covered in forest. São Paulo, for example, was once part of the Atlantic forest biome.

Rafael: That’s right. It’s been at least 100 years since the forest was cut down — longer in some parts of the city. That means that many of the city’s inhabitants don’t even know that their city was once green.

São Paulo was known as the land of mist. The coast nearest to us used to have a dense rainforest. As the humidity traveled from the seashore over the hills separating São Paulo and the coast, there would be a lot of moisture, which helped forests grow. While the really steep parts of these hills are still forested, most of the city and much of the coast has lost its forests, which has taken moisture out of the city. Instead São Paulo is now a bubble of smoke, really dry and hot.

S: Have you started to see the impacts of this?

R: Definitely. This past year Brazil went through its longest drought on record. With the drought came huge wildfires. Even though the Amazon seems quite far from us, the fires were so huge that the smoke darkened the skies in São Paulo during the day. We’re all starting to realize that we need to do something.

When government officials clear forests, they call it “cleaning the area.” We inherited this tradition of clearing forests from European colonizers. Indigenous people used to live in and with forests — it was the Europeans who brought this idea of separation of nature and culture. They associated forests with fear and danger, which is why they called for cutting them down. Now we’re starting to have discussions of how to live with forests again — our hope is to bring forests back into the city and into people’s hearts.

S: The effect of what you’re describing is widespread — it doesn’t respect city limits or borders. The deforestation that is happening in the Amazon, thousands of miles away, has an impact not just in the immediate area, but also ripples across the country. Knowing this, why have you chosen to focus your efforts on planting forests only in São Paulo?

R: We’ve started to ask ourselves, what can we do to contribute and mitigate the worst effects of climate change? In our view, it is more important to be local wherever we are than to be everywhere. We know our city so we can plant the best forest for our city’s biome and needs. We won’t plant as good of a forest if we go to Ecuador for example because we wouldn’t know the best way to do it there.

So instead of planting forests in other parts of the country or other parts of the world, we want to make it feel achievable for other interested people to create an organization like ours, even if it’s super small.

We weren’t specialists before and are still learning so we truly believe that people from different professions can organize themselves and do it too. We’re happy to collaborate with others — we’ve shared knowledge with other networks and people — but we want to move people and make them feel empowered to do it themselves.

S: We have been working with you and your organization, formigas-de-embaúba, for more than two years. Together, we’ve planted 14 pocket forests and food forests in schools and community spaces around São Paulo. How many people have been involved and benefited from these forests?

R: 11 of these are native pocket forests and 3 are food forests, totaling 11,990 trees and covering 4,790 square meters. The food forests average 20 tree species, while the pocket forests range from 86 to 136 species, offering a huge amount of biodiversity.

But the even more impressive numbers are about the people. We involve 360 students in the program at each site, totaling 5,040 students. But because of the size of these schools and CEUs, the number of people who benefit from the forests on a daily basis is even bigger, ranging from the hundreds to the thousands. We estimate a combined reach of more than 20,000 people daily.

S: You mentioned CEUs, which are basically like community centers that offer a range of free services to community members of all ages. What does planting pocket forests in CEUs mean for who is impacted and what kind of impact the forests have?

R: There are 2,000 to 5,000 people going to each of these centers daily, accessing a range of services including schools, sports, language courses, and more. So even though the students are immediately impacted through our pedagogy and the outdoor classrooms, the mini forests themselves leave a huge legacy just by existing.

Some of these people wouldn’t otherwise have easy access to green space. And because heat waves have been hitting the city more frequently, the forests are also becoming one of the only safe places to be outside for people in the community. One of the temperature measurements we did found that the forest soil was almost 20°C lower than the temperature of the school’s concrete patio.

Visitors also benefit from the food forests. These are aimed at food production, so while they’re planted using some of the same principles as the Miyawaki forests, they’re a bit less dense so we can produce more food. We grow a number of native plants, including fruit trees, squash, maize, beans, and sweet potatoes. Anyone in the community can come and harvest what’s growing, which also addresses some of the inequity we face in São Paulo. All of these components combined allow for a more spontaneous use of the forest.

S: As you touched on, there is significant racial and social inequity in Brazil. What is your goal in focusing planting in low-income areas?

R: São Paulo is a very densely populated city, but there is a huge social gap between the rich and poor, which is reflected in how the city is organized. The expanded city center is where the wealthier people are, while the poorer people and the favelas tend to be on the outskirts. These wealthier areas have more green spaces, parks, and trees. By contrast, the parts of the city where we work are quite gray. Many of these children don’t have daily access to a green area, so these forests are an oasis. They're one of the only places where they can reach nature inside the city.

Our aim is to help people living in these areas adapt to the facts of the climate crisis. We see ecosystem regeneration as a tool to fight climate change, but we also recognize that it isn’t easy to make people see the importance of this work when they may be struggling to get food on their table. It won’t work if we just bring the knowledge to them and tell them they should care.

That’s why we hire and train educators who are from the communities where they’re working. We prioritize hiring Black women and train them in our methodology. Then they become the point of contact with the kids. They are much more effective at translating and adapting the work to the community because they’re not outsiders.

S: You have an interesting approach for identifying possible locations for your pocket forests, working with a local organization to help you efficiently scan the city for viable areas. Can you explain how this works?

R: Using readings of satellite imagery we have information on where every public school is across the city. Our partner loads this information into their algorithm and then can set certain criteria based on our needs, such as how much space is available, declivity, the type of terrain, and more. The algorithm automatically scans the data on the thousands of public schools in São Paulo to identify those that meet our needs.

Now that this automated part has been done, we have a person on our team who is responsible for doing outreach to these schools. They contact them to ask if they’d be interested in having a pocket forest and then schedule a technical visit.

S: Community involvement is central to our ethos. We want to ensure that the people involved in the planting and the people who will benefit from the forests are enthusiastic about it, in part because the success of a forest is dependent (at least initially) on people caring for it. In the case of the pocket forests you plant, you have a specific process you follow. What does that look like?

R: We go through a formal consultation process — but it’s not top-down. Because we want to build long-term relationships, we know the forests will only work if the community is on board. So we engage the school and surrounding community to make sure they want the forest.

We involve students and teachers in the planting process and also have open community days, where parents or grandparents of the students and other community members get involved. The programs are targeted at students ranging from as young as 2 to 17 and the education they receive is part of their school curriculum.

We take our commitment to partnering for the long-term seriously. Beyond being present for the actual planting day(s) and facilitating the main pedagogical activities, we also do maintenance for a few years. This isn’t just forest maintenance, but pedagogical maintenance too. Coordinators go back to the forest from time to time, engaging students, teachers, and the community in activities to keep our work alive.

S: It’s not only humans who benefit from these forests — we see an increase in biodiversity too. What have you observed in the pocket forests you’ve planted to date?

R: We see a lot of insects, butterflies, native bees, and numerous bird species, and a huge increase in microfauna in the soil. We’re also seeing more and more fungi. There seems to be a pattern that emerges from forest to forest: flowering shrubs attract bees, the fruits of pioneer trees attract birds, and then within a few years of forest growth, humans begin eating from the forest as well.

When we think about biodiversity, we also consider the trees. We have been trying to increase the biodiversity of the forests themselves to increase resilience. Last year we had 86 different species of trees in our forests. This year that number increased to 136. Our hope is that some of these species will adapt and reproduce even if others don’t.

S: Numbers can obviously positively contribute to increasing resilience, but they aren’t the only thing that matters. It’s also important to carefully consider what types of trees to plant to build the right kind of biodiversity.

R: That’s true. We do research to identify native tree species and include keystone threatened tree species in our forests like Araucaria angustifolia and Euterpe edulis.

At the same time, some native trees that used to be found here may not be here in 30, 50, 100 years’ time. So when we’re planting forests we’re thinking decades ahead — even after our lifetimes. What could the “native forest of the future” look like?

But we don’t just need a diversity of species in our future — we also need a diversity of people doing this work. The more local it is the better solution it is.

S: This is so true, and is exactly why it is so important for us to partner with local organizations like yours to ensure the success of our efforts. What have you learned from taking this localized approach?

R: We could plant more forests and impact a greater number of people if our only focus was on numbers. It could be cheaper if we just did planting days and moved on. But we want to build confidence with these communities. That’s why we focus on long-term commitments to both the forests and people. We want to serve these communities, by bringing this knowledge of ecological restoration to people on a small scale.

We also value long-term relationships with our financiers. SUGi is financing more than 50% of our forests and truly understands what we’re doing. Your network is one of the few that actually works as a network — you have created a diverse network of people from all over the world who feel safe to share the issues they’re facing. We love being able to share and learn from one another in a more open way.

We really believe that if you don’t love it, it won’t work.

Discover the all SUGi Pocket Forests in Brazil.