A restoration project to revitalise the Atlantic forest is making the city a much more liveable place.
Rio de Janeiro’s striking blend of urban infrastructure and tropical jungle, cradled between granite peaks and the sea, earned the city Unesco world heritage status in 2012. Yet few people realise that the verdant forests cloaking Rio’s dramatic hills are largely the result of human intervention.
Photographs taken years apart show how reforestation has transformed Morro Do Urubu, an area in the north of Rio de Janeiro: left, virtually treeless in 1990; right, abundant tree cover in 2019.
“None of this was here before. Nothing, zero trees,” says Santos, motioning towards the woods surrounding Tavares Bastos, a small favela clinging to a hill that overlooks Guanabara Bay. The 40-year-old, who uses the name Leleco, planted some of those trees himself as part of a pioneering reforestation project run by the municipal government, reports The Guardian.
Leleco initially got involved with the project because he needed a job. Twenty years on, he leads three small teams to maintain and enrich restored forests at Tavares Bastos and two other sites. It’s challenging work that involves toiling away in the heat, scrambling up steep slopes with delicate seedlings and constantly weeding invasive non-native species such as bamboo. Still, Leleco couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
The programme, known today as Refloresta Rio, was set up by the city government in 1986. By 2019, it had transformed the city’s landscape, having trained 15,000 local workers like Leleco, who have planted 10 million seedlings across 3,462 hectares (8,500 acres) – roughly 10 times the area of New York’s Central Park.
“I know of no other project in the world, run by a municipal government, that is as big as the Refloresta Rio project,” says Richieri Sartori, a professor of biological sciences at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.