By 2016, deforestation had already consumed 19% of the Amazon biome (Prodes/Inpe). Among the nine states of the Legal Amazon, Pará is the one that has contributed the most to accumulated deforestation in the region. Therefore, promoting environmental regularization in Pará is essential to achieving national restoration commitments, which aim to restore at least 12 million hectares in Brazil by 2030.

However, in studies conducted on forest restoration, Imazon found that advancing restoration efforts required overcoming several barriers, such as: (i) rural producers’ perception that restoration is an expensive, complex, and bureaucratic process; (ii) lack of adequate technical assistance; (iii) insufficient technical capacity to implement forest restoration processes; (iv) limited access to financing for restoration; and (v) lack of leadership and governance on forest restoration in the Amazon.

Pará brings together a solid information base and a network of partners for forest restoration. However, what was missing was the connection among these components to make forest restoration a reality. Within the project, forest restoration actions were implemented to help overcome these barriers and to scale up environmental regularization efforts.

The project’s direct area of operation (eastern Pará) is part of the Amazon’s deforestation arc. The municipalities of Paragominas, Ulianópolis, and Dom Eliseu were once included on the MMA’s list of municipalities with critical deforestation and managed to be removed from it by controlling deforestation and advancing CAR registration. By engaging different local actors (public sector, family farmers, and companies) through a territorial approach, the project enabled the understanding of local particularities, the contextualization of external models, and the consideration of local dynamics.

The project’s central objective was to support the advancement of environmental compliance of rural properties in the Legal Amazon. To achieve this goal, rural properties were selected to receive restoration support from the project, with the aim of demonstrating the implementation of restoration models suited to the characteristics of rural properties, their users, and the Amazonian landscape, so that successful experiences could be disseminated and scaled up. Strategies were also developed for the training of agents, for monitoring, and for fostering forest restoration. 

The four technical components, in addition to the management component, are described below:

Component 1 – Forest restoration in eastern Pará: implementation of forest restoration projects through the following activities: defining the area to be restored; conducting diagnostics and establishing baseline conditions; preparing technical protocols for forest restoration; supporting the implementation of restoration in small rural properties, including the provision of seedlings and inputs; and documentation and dissemination.

Component 2 – Forest Restoration Training Program: development and implementation of a forest restoration training program aimed at preparing 100 multiplier agents, creating a critical technical mass capable of scaling up restoration efforts in Pará and the surrounding region.

Component 3 – Monitoring of forest restoration: development, in partnership with environmental agencies and technical assistance organizations, of a monitoring workflow for areas under restoration, combining remote sensing technologies with field inspections. To develop this workflow, the following activities were carried out: mapping areas undergoing natural regeneration; creating a geospatial database; organizing workshops and training courses; and designing a strategy for continuous monitoring.

Component 4 – Strategy for fostering forest restoration: identification of key opportunities to promote forest restoration, including cost–benefit analyses, assessments of new financial arrangements, and technical assistance mechanisms capable of making restoration more attractive. As the final output of this component, a restoration promotion guide was developed, taking into account the main contexts observed in Component 1.

The project was aligned with the “Sustainable Production” (Component 1) and “Science, Innovation, and Economic Instruments” (Component 4) of the Amazon Fund’s Logical Framework.

Its direct effects were defined as follows: (i) Expanded managerial and technical capacities for the implementation of restoration activities; (ii) Recovery of deforested and degraded areas for economic purposes and ecological conservation; and (iii) Knowledge and technologies aimed at the sustainable use of the Amazon biome produced, disseminated, and applied.

The project’s deliverables aligned with these direct effects generally sought to facilitate the processes of mobilizing and engaging rural property holders in the environmental and productive regularization of their areas, within a cooperation strategy involving Municipal Environmental Secretariats (Semma) and other key stakeholders. In practical terms, this facilitation occurred through technical inputs (e.g., maps, information, training, and studies on strategic topics), material inputs (e.g., seedlings, fertilizers, and tools for family farmers), and specialized operational support (e.g., labor for the implementation of agroforestry systems).

Finally, considering that the environmental and productive regularization of rural properties is a structuring action for formalizing the protection of remaining forests and/or areas under advanced regeneration, restoring deforested and/or degraded areas in Permanent Preservation Areas (APP) and/or Legal Reserves (RL), and identifying areas for alternative land use, among other property attributes, by providing the necessary inputs to scale up rural property compliance, the project contributed to the Amazon Fund’s overall objective of reducing deforestation while promoting sustainable development in the Legal Amazon.

The main activities and deliverables of the project were:

• Implementation of 104.8 hectares of agroforestry systems (SAFs), directly benefiting 136 family farming households who joined the project between 2021 and 2023 in the municipalities of Capitão Poço, Dom Eliseu, and Ulianópolis, in Pará.

• Mapping of 927.4 hectares under natural regeneration for more than five years (outside the fallow cycle) on the same 136 properties that received SAFs, with potential for lower‑cost forest restoration through Assisted Natural Regeneration (ANR).

• Preparation of 136 Environmental Assessments, one for each property that received an SAF, including maps and land‑cover analyses based on the Native Vegetation Protection Law (LPVN) No. 12.651/2012 (conditions in 2008 and more recent years) and recommendations for environmental compliance measures when needed.

• Enrollment of 60 new family farmers in 2023, from the municipality of Paragominas, who were provided with an “SAF kit” to support the planting of an estimated 30 hectares during the 2024 rainy season. The kit included seedlings of Amazonian native forest species, soil-preparation inputs (liming and fertilization), and agricultural tools.

• Compliance analysis with the LPVN for 525 rural properties (with 2,482 maps produced), mostly medium and large holdings, undergoing licensing procedures or holding a municipal Rural Environmental License (LAR) in Dom Eliseu, Paragominas, and Ulianópolis between 2018 and 2019. This was part of a collaborative strategy with the Semmas to engage this group in joining the Environmental Regularization Program (PRA) and in submitting and complying with Degraded and Altered Area Recovery Projects (Pradas). In this group alone, 13,000 hectares of riparian Permanent Preservation Areas (APPs) requiring restoration were identified at that time.

• Mapping of 180,000 hectares recommended as priorities for environmental regularization processes in the four project target municipalities in 2023, based on the potential for low‑cost, faster, and scalable restoration, as these were areas under natural regeneration for more than five years and with low agricultural potential (low opportunity cost and lower pressure for land conversion).

• Implementation of the course “Formar Restauração Florestal – Family Farming” for 128 participants, including 61 women and 67 men family farmers from Dom Eliseu, Paragominas, and Ulianópolis. The course was delivered in three cohorts (150 hours each), in person, in selected rural community hubs.

• Implementation of the course “Formar Restauração Florestal – Technicians and Extension Agents” for 72 participants, including 25 women and 47 men working in the Semmas of Dom Eliseu, Paragominas, and Ulianópolis (48-hour in-person format) and in Municipal Prosecutors’ Offices and other bodies or working groups of State Public Ministries (8-hour virtual format).

• Technical and operational support for the implementation of the “Salas‑floresta” initiative in 2021 and 2022, which established an “Educational SAF” in a rural public school in Ulianópolis, trained 27 educators from seven participating schools, and reached more than 300 students. The initiative was led by Instituto Gesto (currently Instituto Motriz) under the Plantar Educação Program, in partnership with Municipal Education Secretariats and other partners.

• Development of the FloreSer System, which generates information on secondary vegetation in the Amazon biome and makes it available through a visualization dashboard. FloreSer currently includes secondary vegetation data from 1986 to 2022, and the dashboard allows users to select the geographic scope of interest, Amazon biome, states, or municipalities, with automatic presentation of: (i) total area of secondary vegetation (in hectares); (ii) secondary vegetation by territorial class; (iii) secondary vegetation by age; and (iv) suppression pressure on secondary vegetation.

• Production of 7 publications and 18 technical and scientific events. The main publications targeted at specialized audiences or stakeholders involved in forest restoration addressed topics such as secondary vegetation in the Amazon biome, monitoring, restoration costs, and strategies for restoration financing. These topics were also featured in dozens of technical events, promoting extensive debate and dissemination of project results.

• Production of 65 videos across 15 titles, which collectively reached approximately 147,000 views between September 2022 and December 2023. The videos presented project results and technical content on environmental compliance and forest restoration for a broad audience. Customized versions were produced for different media platforms and social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and YouTube Shorts.

The activities of the project contributed to the results related to the “Sustainable Production” (Component 1) and “Science, Innovation, and Economic Instruments” (Component 4) of the Amazon Fund’s Logical Framework.

Below are the results for the indicators agreed upon for monitoring the expected direct effects.