By Manuela Andreoni
SAO PAULO, March 26 (Reuters) – The Brazilian government auctioned its first-ever public land concession for reforestation to startup Re.green, marking an initial attempt to use carbon credits to finance the recovery of millions of acres of degraded protected areas.
Re.green was the only bidder offering to restore and help protect a 145,000-acre plot in the Bom Futuro reserve in the Amazon rainforest for 40 years.
It offered a fee of 0.7% of revenue from the sale of carbon credits earned through the project, expected to reach around $2 million annually, according to the auction notice released by the government.
The company is one of a group of carbon removal startups buying degraded lands from farmers and ranchers to replant tree species native to Brazilian forests. Bom Futuro will be its first project in a government-owned area.
An Indigenous community of the Karitiana people who live in the area will also be part of the project.
“We are managing to turn something that is extremely negative for the climate, biodiversity and local populations into something positive,” said Environment Minister Marina Silva during the auction at the Sao Paulo stock exchange on Wednesday.
Decades of deforestation and the growing impact of climate change have pushed the Amazon rainforest toward a tipping point, beyond which scientists warn it could start an irreversible transformation into a degraded biome.
Researchers say halting deforestation is no longer enough, and that governments must reforest vast sections of the forest to protect it.
Brazil’s nascent carbon market is attracting interest from private investors and lenders looking to restore native forests and sell credits for the carbon they remove from the atmosphere to offset companies’ emissions.
The auction was a test of whether such projects can operate at a scale that will help the government achieve its goal of reforesting some 30 million acres of forest by 2030.
A second, slightly smaller plot of the Bom Futuro reserve received no bids at the auction.
Officials said they were still satisfied with the results, because the model is new and untested.
The government plans to offer some 750,000 acres under this model by 2027, said Garo Batmanian, the head of Brazil’s forestry service. Officials have mapped 3.2 million acres of protected areas in need of restoration, he added.
(Reporting by Manuela AndreoniEditing by Brad Haynes and Nia Williams)
