O Brasil deveria manter a floresta em pé e vender o carbono

Brazil has an extraordinarily complex relationship with its original ecosystems. In the five centuries since the first European settlement, a third of Brazil's territory has been converted for human use–roughly 280 million hectares. It was a chaotic process that generated little wealth and high ecological costs. Yet, today, Brazil is the world's largest net food exporter while still holding two-thirds of its territory as natural ecosystems, including the world's largest tropical forest, the Amazon. This essay recounts how that tension came about, and what science and Brazilian society learned from it.

It also makes three claims. First, the case for preserving and restoring forests is neither new nor imported. Brazil learned it by trial and error and codified the lesson into law. Second, enforcing that law works; deforestation control is by far the largest greenhouse-gas reduction available to Brazil, accounting for more than 90% of what the country can abate through 2030. Third, compliance is a floor and not a destination. Brazil holds an unmatched combination of land, restoration technology, and capital to develop a carbon dioxide removal sector; the one factor it lacks is a market–which is why restricting the export of removal credits, as the government now proposes, would forfeit the country's chance to build it at world-class scale.

TWIN CRISES

The tension between converting land for human use and the consequences for the availability of ecosystem services is not new, but it has recently taken on a planetary scale. Climate change and loss of natural ecosystems are two mutually reinforcing crises that are destabilizing the biosphere (Pörtner et al. 2023; Richardson et al. 2023). Land-use change is the second-largest source of anthropogenic carbon dioxide, after the burning of fossil fuels (Friedlingstein et al. 2026), but the causation runs the other way as well. Global warming and the rising frequency and intensity of the droughts, fires, and floods that accompany it disturb and degrade natural systems, eroding their capacity to deliver the ecosystem services we depend on and releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (IPCC 2022). Each crisis feeds the other.

Halting deforestation and restoring tropical forests are two fundamental pillars of the effort to achieve net-zero emissions. However, forests cannot be reduced to a carbon stock. Beyond its effect on global warming, deforestation has regional and local consequences that can be severe, immediate, and directly attributable. When a tropical forest is cleared, the consequences include changes in rainfall patterns, river flow, soils, and local temperature (Ellison et al. 2017). Brazil has known this–and documented it–for centuries.

BRAZIL’S STRUGGLE WITH NATURE

Brazil's history is inseparable from the destruction of the Atlantic Forest. In With Broadax and Firebrand, Warren Dean (1995) showed that the country underwent five centuries of forest clearing to extract wood and open ground for sugar, coffee, cattle, and cities. However, the problem was neither the conversion of natural ecosystems to human use nor even its scale. The problem was the failure to see that, without a healthy balance between converted land and standing forest, the process was self-defeating. Most of the destruction generated little or no wealth: land was cleared and burned, planted for a few seasons until the soil gave out, and abandoned–leaving poor ground and a forest that would not return. It was a bad trade (Pádua 2002).

At least one extreme case led to action. In the first half of the 19th century, coffee plantations stripped the Tijuca massif above Rio de Janeiro of its forest, and the springs that fed the city–Carioca, Maracanã, Comprido–began to fail. In 1861, Emperor Dom Pedro II placed the massif under federal administration. He ordered its reforestation, carried out by Major Manuel Gomes Archer. It was one of the world’s first large-scale watershed restoration efforts–undertaken not for the planet, but because a city had lost its water (Drummond 1996).

Until 1960, the Amazon remained largely intact, cleared only in thin ribbons along its rivers. What broke that pattern was not scarcity or population pressure but a deliberate national project. The Belém-Brasília highway, inaugurated in 1960, mattered less for what it cleared than for what it announced: a vision in which development meant clearing the forest. When the military took power in 1964, the government made that idea a doctrine, recasting the occupation of the forest as national integration and territorial defense and driving it forward with penetration roads, directed colonization, cheap credit, and tax incentives. The clearing that followed was not a disorderly wave but a subsidized one–planned, financed, and celebrated by the State: a 20th-century rerun of the Atlantic Forest’s destruction, this time underwritten by the State (Becker 2005).

The consequences are already showing. What the 19th century learned locally with the water crisis in Rio de Janeiro, the 21st century is learning at a continental scale. The flying rivers–the aerial moisture flows that the Amazon recycles and carries southward–link the standing forest to the rainfall that sustains the Cerrado, one of the world’s breadbaskets and a pillar of Brazilian exports, and to the reservoirs that generate hydroelectric power in the Southeast (Arraut et al. 2012). Work by the Climate Policy Initiative/PUC-Rio has begun to put a price on that connection, tying deforestation to lost agricultural output and lost power generation (CPI/PUC-Rio 2024;2025); Flores and colleagues (2024) have mapped how close the coupled pressures of warming and forest loss push the system toward a threshold beyond which it may not recover. The forest is infrastructure–for agriculture, for energy, for the water supply of Brazilian cities.

HOW THE PROTECTION OF NATURAL ECOSYSTEMS BECAME LAW

A two-century political debate that began with Rio de Janeiro's water supply evolved into the 2012 Native Vegetation Protection Law (NVPL). In 1817, a royal decree banned tree-cutting around the headwaters of the Rio Carioca (Brasil 1817). In 1861, Dom Pedro II expropriated the coffee estates in the Tijuca massif and ordered that its slopes be replanted (Brasil 1861). The lesson, learned early and expensively, was that forests are infrastructure. In 1934, Brazil adopted its first Forest Code (Brasil 1934), an aspirational set of rules that proved impossible to enforce. The Forest Code was given operational form in 1965, when Law 4.771 fixed the width of Permanent Preservation Areas along rivers and hilltops and set the Legal Reserve–a share of every rural property to be held under native vegetation (Brasil 1965).

Finally, after a thirteen-year fight in Congress, the 2012 Native Vegetation Protection Law was enacted (Brasil 2012). It survived presidential vetoes and repeated redrafting and was denounced by both sides: by agribusiness as a threat to agricultural production, and by the scientific community as an undue compromise that granted amnesty to wrongdoers and reduced the areas to be preserved and restored (Brancalion et al. 2016). What emerged, however, was not merely a compromise but an action plan. The law created a self-declared registry of all rural properties (the CAR), a regularization program with 20-year restoration commitments, and a tradable quota for surplus native vegetation (Soares-Filho et al. 2014). In 2018, after what the president of the Supreme Court called “the most debated legal instrument since the Constituent Assembly,” most of it was upheld (Consultor Jurídico 2018; STF 2018).

COMPLIANCE DELIVERS

Enforcing the Native Vegetation Protection Law (NVPL) is a step toward a better local and regional relationship with natural ecosystems. No one is perfectly happy with the law, but implementing it and moving from poor compliance to full compliance will create room for other policies that can help fine-tune the scale and location of native vegetation. Full compliance also creates a baseline against which the costs and benefits of additional policies can be assessed.

Compliance with the NVPL and deforestation control are also central to Brazil’s climate commitment. Land use is the country’s largest source of gross emissions, which makes it the swing factor in the 2035 NDC target (Brasil 2024a). With other sectors held to the ceilings set out in the national mitigation strategy (Brasil, Comitê Interministerial sobre Mudança do Clima 2025), the target depends on moving land use from source to sink. Curbing illegal deforestation is the single most important action available. Modeling of Brazil’s mitigation pathways finds that deforestation control contributes more than 90% of the emissions reduction achieved through 2030–more than any other measure, in any sector (Soterroni et al. 2023).

WHAT IS NEXT AFTER COMPLIANCE

Compliance with NVPL is a major step in climate change mitigation and protection of natural capital. But Brazil must go further. It can lead the way to solutions for the twin crises, offering not only a scalable, ready-to-deploy framework but also a new paradigm for the relationship between humans and nature.

Brazil is the largest global producer and exporter of soybeans, orange juice, sugar, and coffee. It is the leading exporter of both beef and wood pulp and one of the three largest producers of maize, while maintaining top-tier production volumes for cotton, beans, and many other agricultural products (FAO 2026).

All of this is produced on 273 million hectares–63 million for agriculture, 155 million for pasture, 46 million for a mosaic of uses, and 9 million for planted forests (MapBiomas 2025a).^[1] That is roughly one-third of the national territory, meaning that the remaining two-thirds is, in effect, held under native vegetation (Embrapa Territorial 2025).

The fundamental question Brazil faces is how to optimize its portfolio of goods, given the opportunity to use land for tropical forest restoration. Restoring native vegetation produces two distinct goods, and they behave very differently: one is carbon removal–global, fungible, identical wherever it is sequestered, and therefore tradable; the other is ecosystem services–regulating water, recycling rainfall, moderating local climate, harboring biodiversity–that, while contributing to global stability, deliver their most direct and measurable benefits to local and regional communities.

Today, the main way to make large-scale forest restoration economically viable is to rely on carbon offset credits. If Brazil wants to lead the world in carbon sequestration, it must start by positioning itself as a reliable supplier of credits. Carbon removal through forest restoration is an alternative land use. For the activity to be economically viable, four things are needed: land, technology, finance, and a market.

Land

Brazil has plenty of land to work with. Pasture covers 155 million hectares (MapBiomas 2025a), and Strassburg et al. (2014) found the planted share of it–some 112 million hectares (IBGE 2019)–running at a third of its sustainable carrying capacity. That gap is closing on its own: between 2000 and 2024, Brazilian pasture posted a net gain in vigor across six million hectares, and three-quarters of the area now shows medium or high vigor (MapBiomas 2025b). Intensification is already sparing land–and there is far more to spare, enough on Strassburg's numbers to absorb everything Brazilian agriculture needs through 2040 and still free 36 million hectares for restoration to native ecosystems, much of it tropical forest.

Technology

Technology is perhaps the most distinctive dimension of Brazil’s competitive advantage in tropical forest restoration. Three mutually reinforcing factors set the country apart. The first is a long history of restoration practice. As mentioned, documented forest restoration in Brazil dates back to at least 1861, among the earliest large-scale tropical forest restoration efforts anywhere. Over the following century and a half, restoration practice and the science informing it co-evolved through successive phases, from ad hoc replanting to the high-diversity, ecologically grounded methods that define the field today (Rother, Romanelli, & Rodrigues 2023). The second is leadership in the science of ecological restoration: Brazil is the single most prolific country in the global tropical forest restoration literature, accounting on its own for roughly a quarter of all publications in the field (Viani & Reid 2025), reflecting national scientific capacity built over decades of sustained investigation (Rodrigues et al. 2009). The third is a commanding position in agricultural and forestry technology, developed over half a century of transformation in tropical agriculture and planted forests, and transferred directly to restoration. Together, these factors have created the basis for an informed, technologically intensive restoration sector–one capable of operating at scale.

Finance

Restoration is a capital-intensive activity with a large cash-flow gap: investment is concentrated in the first two years, while revenues arrive between years four and 50. Given this severe mismatch between early capital expenditure and long-deferred revenue, private markets often hesitate to take on early-stage risk. In Brazil, the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES) fulfills its developmental mission by providing patient capital–extended grace periods and subsidized rates through the Climate Fund–acting as a catalyst to jump-start the restoration sector. This is not unprecedented; it is a deliberate repetition of the bank’s historical role in building complex, capital-intensive industries. Just as it absorbed early technological and market risks to build the pulp-and-paper industry in the 1970s and to structure the wind-power sector in the 2000s, it is now supporting forest restoration.

Market

As much as land, technology, and finance matter, the activity will ultimately be defined by the market. For twenty-five years, the market for carbon credits has been complex and highly unstable. From the rise and unwinding of the Clean Development Mechanism to the boom-and-bust cycles of the voluntary carbon market, there has never been a stable, deep, and reliable market for carbon credits.

More recently, the emergence of long-term offtake contracts–exemplified by the large corporate removal purchases struck from 2023 onward–created a new market structure capable of sustaining large-scale restoration and a range of novel removal technologies. However, it proved just as prone to stop-and-go as the spot markets that preceded it: when a single anchor buyer pauses, the market suffers.

A deep and durable market will emerge only through demand for compliance. The World Bank counts 87 direct carbon-pricing instruments in operation worldwide–47 carbon taxes and 40 emissions trading systems, together covering 29% of global emissions–spread across jurisdictions with different scopes, standards, and rules (World Bank 2026). Crucially, most of these systems place tight limits on offset credits, and several exclude them entirely.

Compliance markets are converging on a single gate. Switzerland buys only credits authorized under its bilateral Article 6 agreements. Singapore's carbon tax accepts only credits carrying a corresponding adjustment. Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA), mandatory from 2027, excludes any unit the host country has not authorized. The EU still takes no offsets in its Emissions Trading System, but opened a window in March 2026: from 2036, up to five percentage points of the 2040 target may be met with international credits–a small share in proportion, an enormous one in absolute terms (European Union 2026). That makes the regulation under Article 6 and each host country's willingness to authorize transfers and make corresponding adjustments the decisive variable for a country's competitiveness in carbon offset markets.

This is where Brazil’s own choices prove decisive. Brazil has built its compliance market–the SBCE, created by Law 15.042/2024 (Brasil 2024b)–around a national credit, the CRVE, that can either serve domestic compliance or, once authorized by the designated national authority, be transferred internationally as an Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcome (ITMO). In July 2026, the government released for consultation its first draft rules for such transfers, proposing to channel them through central agreements and public calls, subject to biennial quantitative ceilings and anchored to a target of cutting net national emissions by 100 million tons of CO₂e between 2031 and 2035 (Brasil, Ministério da Fazenda 2026).

CONCLUSION

The Brazilian government wants to restrict exports because exporting an authorized removal credit carries a corresponding adjustment, which means that the exported credit no longer counts toward the Brazilian NDC. From this point of view, restricting exports can look prudent. It is not.

It is not prudent because the export debate concerns new removals that, in the absence of a market, will not occur. A new market does not deplete a national asset; it creates one. Carbon removal is a genuinely global good, and a sector built on exports can scale up, learn by doing, and lower restoration costs. Export demand would complement Brazil’s other competitive advantages, creating a sector that adds to the long list of products in which the country already leads the world.

Brazil has a rare opportunity: to close a five-century experiment in trial and error with a deliberate plan for balancing natural ecosystems and converted land. The Native Vegetation Protection Law and the NDC set the floor; the ambition to become the world's largest remover of carbon dioxide sets the goal. Getting that balance right would be Brazil's most decisive contribution to the twin crises of ecosystem loss and climate change–and Brazil stands to win twice: it can sell the removal, which benefits the planet wherever it happens, and keep the forest, whose benefits fall disproportionately on the country where it stands. Brazil would then be a country unlike any other: the world's largest net food exporter and, at the same time, its largest remover of carbon dioxide. 

Disclosure Statement: The author is co-founder and Chairman of re.green, a for-profit company that develops large-scale ecological restoration projects and generates carbon credits. Given the relevance of these activities to the topics discussed in this article, this affiliation is disclosed in the interest of transparency regarding potential conflicts of interest.

Notes

[1]Ibá reports the planted forests areas as 10.5 million hectares. The two figures are not directly comparable. MapBiomas classifies annual land cover from satellite imagery and assigns each pixel to the class observed in that year, so stands that have been harvested and not yet replanted, and young stands, whose canopy has not yet closed, fall outside the planted-forest class. Ibá reports the total area dedicated to planted trees across the whole harvest cycle, mapped by Canopy Remote Sensing Solutions. On a typical six-to-seven-year eucalyptus rotation, the share of the estate standing harvested or newly planted at any moment is large enough to account for most of the difference.

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Submitted: July 26, 2026

Accepted for publication: August 18, 2026

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