The once-huge Atlantic Forest has become a key focus of ecological restoration in Brazil, thanks to its biological riches, its highly degraded state and its status as the main water source for nearly three-quarters of the country’s population.

The tropical and subtropical forest survives to greater or lesser degrees in 17 mostly coastal Brazilian states, with 8% extending into Argentina and Paraguay. Its current footprint of 315,000 square kilometers (122,000 sq. miles)—an area the size of the U.S. state of New Mexico—represents only 24% of its original, pre-colonial size. Of this surviving quarter, roughly half is mature, well-preserved forest while the rest is highly fragmented and degraded.

As extensive as the better-known destruction of the Amazon rainforest has been—17 to 20% cleared since pre-colonial times—the felling of Atlantic Forest has been far more severe. That’s because from the start of colonization, its coastal habitat lay directly in the path of the country’s voracious development. Relentless settlement eventually turned coastal forests into urban sprawl, all the while fueling an expanding slash-and-burn farming and cattle-ranching frontier further inland. Currently, the Atlantic Forest biome, or what’s left of it, is home to 72% of Brazil’s population.

Increasingly, however, that population has come to realize that the quality and quantity of its water depends on restoring degraded Atlantic Forest river basins. Partly as a result, reforestation projects in the biome have gained traction, showing considerably more progress than those in the Amazon. Other reasons for the progress is the vast quantity of cleared land available for reforestation and the relative ease of reaching it given its proximity to population centers—making reintroduction of fledgling, nursery-raised trees less costly.

“Also, the Atlantic Forest’s coastal location puts it closer to investors and makes it the home of Brazil’s biggest environmental nonprofits doing such restoration,” says Alexis Bastos, project coordinator of the Rioterra Study Center, a Brazilian nonprofit that reforests land in the southwest portion of the country’s Amazon region. “The biome also [has] more reforestation specialists than in the [Brazilian] Amazon and far fewer violent land conflicts, which often involve armed land grabbers.”

The work requires far more than the stroke of a pen. Some 80 to 90% of the biome’s land is private property cleared by settlers or their descendants, so reforestation efforts require cooperation with landowners. Reforestation efforts in the biome—involving nonprofits, for-profit companies and state governments—are extensive, more so, even, than those in the Amazon region.

Despite being significantly more degraded than the Amazon, the Atlantic Forest hosts Brazil’s largest number of endemic animal and plant species, thanks largely to the varied elevations of its mountainous terrain, which can reach nearly 3,000 meters (9,843 feet) above sea level. Endangered endemic animals of the Atlantic Forest include the golden lion tamarin (Leontopithecus rosalia), a squirrel-sized, golden-maned monkey; the red-billed curassow (Crax blumenbachii), a large ground-dwelling bird; and the northern maned sloth (Bradypus torquatus).

Among the biome’s endangered endemic flora, meanwhile, are brazilwood (Paubrasilia echinata), which is the national tree of Brazil and is traditionally used to make red dye and bows for stringed instruments; Paraná pine; (Araucaria angustifolia), a candelabra-shaped conifer; and a shrub in the myrtle family (Campomanesia laurifolia Gardner). These and other plants and trees of the Atlantic Forest help sustain nine of Brazil’s 12 major river basins, according to SOS Atlantic Forest Foundation (Sosma), a respected, four-decade-old nonprofit that promotes protection of the forest. “This biome supplies water to most of Brazil’s population, safeguards its rich biodiversity and helps regulate climate,” says Luis Fernando Guedes Pinto, Sosma’s executive director. “It is also where forest restoration began in Brazil and where the first university-based restoration research centers were established, giving it a historical installed capacity for [forest] restoration.”

In Nov. 2025, São Paulo-based Sosma launched the Atlantic Forest Alliance, a multi-stakeholder coalition whose goal is to restore the Tietê and Southern Paraíba river basins. The Tietê River runs through southeastern São Paulo state and the Paraíba traverses São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais states. The Alliance works to improve the health of the two watersheds and, by extension, water supply and quality for the 12 million people who live in the tri-state region’s 170 municipalities.

According to a Sosma report, 17.2% of water samples tested in 2024 in 14 of 17 Atlantic Forest states ranked “bad” or “very bad” after registering 16% the previous year. The organization says “bad” or “very bad” means the water is not fit for human and livestock consumption, nor for activities including fishing, swimming and industrial uses.

The Alliance plans to restore 5,000 hectares (12,355 acres) of mostly private land in the two watersheds with native, nursery-raised fledgling trees by 2030. It has already raised and invested R$150 million (US$27 million) and aims to raise R$350 million (US$63.5 million) more for the work, which includes planting trees to create biodiversity corridors between forest fragments.

The Alliance is an expansion of Sosma’s Territorial Strategy, an initiative that from 2021 to 2025 raised R$180 million (US$33 million) from private-sector partners and planted 7.2 million trees to restore 360 hectares (900 acres) of mostly private land in the same two hydrographic regions.

“Unlike our Territorial Strategy, which reforested isolated patches of degraded land, our alliance takes a more integrated and science-based approach, using geospatial analysis to identify where, in the same two regions, reforestation will best boost both water quality and biodiversity,” says Fernando Guedes Pinto. The Alliance has enlisted two private-sector financing partners—Salesforce, a U.S. customer-relationship management platform, and the Dutch brewer Heineken Group.

State governments have launched Atlantic Forest restoration initiatives, too. The state of Rio de Janeiro’s “Forests of Tomorrow” initiative is one of the largest such efforts, says Telmo Borges, head of forests and climate change for the state’s environmental secretariat. “Our restoration of the biome is ambitious because a severe drought that hit our state in 2014-2015 caused a scarcity of water supply and desertification in the northern part of the state,” he says.

Phased approach

The program’s first phase, from 2021 to 2026, focused on restoration of degraded river basins to boost water supply, primarily on private lands. The state spent R$69 million (US$13 million) to reforest 973 hectares (2,404 acres)—mainly in the Macacu River basin whose waterways empty into Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay, and in deforested areas around the bay.

A R$60 million (US$11 million) second phase, partially financed by Brazil’s Development Bank (BNDES), is scheduled to run from 2026 to 2031. The state plans to spend R$60 million (US$11 million) in that period to reforest 1,000 hectares (2,471 acres) in its increasingly dry northern region. BNDES has also financed private-sector reforestation efforts in the biome.

“Forests of Tomorrow’s” long-term goal is to conduct reforestation that by 2050 boosts the state’s portion of the Atlantic Forest by 10%, or 440,000 hectares—an area larger than the U.S. state of Rhode Island—and remove 159 million tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere.

For its part, the southeastern state of Espírito Santo offers Atlantic Forest region landowners—mainly farmers and ranchers—payments for environmental services. Such payments typically provide landowners with ongoing income in return for taking restoration and conservation steps that bolster water resources and biodiversity, mainly by restoration and conservation of headwaters and riverbank areas.

This Espírito Santo “Reforest Program,” launched in 2011, has made R$105 million (US$20 million) in payments to restore 12,000 hectares (29,650 acres) and to help conserve an additional 13,000 hectares (32,120 acres). The aim is to restore 10,000 more hectares (24,710 acres) of the biome by 2030.

Some nonprofits are conducting smaller-scale reforestation of the Atlantic Forest. The Copaíba Environmental Association, founded in 1999 by twin sisters Flávia and Anna Paula Balderi, has restored 800 hectares (1,928 acres) of land that had been used to grow coffee and raise cattle in São Paulo state’s Peixe and Camanducaia river basins. It aims to restore 800 more hectares by 2030. “We mobilized 350 small landowners, each having two to three hectares of land to reforest, an effort that improved the soil and the health of those two river basins,” says Flávia Balderi.

Reforestation as business

For-profit firms are also working on reforestation and agroforestry projects in the biome. Their goal, they say, is to help combat climate change and biodiversity loss while generating green-friendly economic returns. (See related story and Q&A—this issue.)

Complementing such initiatives is PPMata Atlântica, a conservation plan for the Atlantic Forest that center-left President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva unveiled in May 2025. The plan is the latest in a series of such blueprints the Lula administration has drafted for each of Brazil’s six terrestrial biomes. PPMata Atlântica aims to push for improved enforcement; sustainable forest uses; value-added, green-friendly forest production; and settlement of land disputes.

All eyes will be on the Atlantic Forest’s land-clearing rate. In 2024, the latest year for which definitive data is available, tighter forest enforcement by the Lula administration appeared to be succeeding. Atlantic Forest land-clearing that year was 38% below its level in 2023, says the National Institute of Space Research (INPE). The decline has continued in 2025, with deforestation 42% below its pace in the first three months of 2024, according to MapBiomas, a multi-stakeholder network that analyzes satellite imagery of the region.