“Planting trees to be able to live in peace“

It all started with depression. “I had seen such terrible things in Rwanda that I was ashamed to be part of the human race,” recalls Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado in a documentary made by broadcaster Rede Globo. Falling ill both physically and mentally, he retreated to the farm where he grew up, which he was to take over from his parents. Instead of the rainforest he expected, he found a barren, diseased landscape. Would it be possible to sow grass there and breed cattle like his father had done? Salgado’s wife Lélia had a different idea: “We have to replant the forest that was here before.” Salgado registered more than 600 hectares of the site as a private nature reserve and founded the non-governmental organisation Instituto Terra in 1998 to manage it. Since 2023, support for the organisation has come from Germany, via the development and investment bank Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW).

It was not easy at the beginning. 60 percent of the first seedlings died. There was a lack of nutrients and rainfall, and the soil was depleted. As the years passed, Salgado and his team learned to take better care of the young trees. 26 years later, the hills on Bulcão farm in Aimorés have been reforested and additional projects are being developed. “Most of the neighbours had no drinking water on their land,” says Salgado. Their springs were not protected from the sun or from the hooves of the cattle. Instituto Terra had revegetated more than 2,000 dry springs before the first ones start to bubble up again. “Life returned – insects, birds, the first mammals – and as nature began to thrive on the farm, my will to live returned, too,” says Salgado.

Environmental education is another part of the Institute’s work. “I was so excited when I was selected for the Terrinhas project that I didn’t sleep a wink for nights on end,” recalls Thais Moraes Reis. She travelled to the Bulcão farm once a month with a group of other school students from the surrounding countryside who were aged 11 to 12 at the time. “We watched films about the water cycle and about recycling and waste separation.” She spent three years learning with the other Terrinhas, as the children are called. During this time she initiated a waste separation project at her school and planted a vegetable patch with her classmates. Having gone on to do a degree in education, she has now been running the youth projects Terrinhas and Terra Doce herself since 2023.

The work of the institute depends entirely on donations: these are used to finance the 30 employees and the infrastructure, including a tree nursery, off-road vehicles and work equipment. The work with the Terrinhas lay dormant for years for financial reasons. Since 2023, Germany has been the most important supporter of the project through the KfW. KfW portfolio manager Hans Christian Schmidt is impressed with the institute’s commitment, networking and reputation in the region. With 13 million euros in funding from the KfW, the project includes replanting of an additional 2,200 hectares of forest vegetation and the reactivation of more than 2,000 springs and watercourses. The plan is also to implement training and advisory programmes for the dissemination of technologies for reforestation, protection and sustainable use, explains Schmidt. 

The aim: to get 360,000 springs flowing again

They used to persuade each farmer individually of the benefits of spring rehabilitation, says Gilson Oliveira, project manager at Instituto Terra and a farmer himself. But now they go directly to the rural cooperatives and associations. As he proudly reports: “We’ve already exceeded our interim target for the current year in June, namely pledges for 427 hectares of reforestation area.” Of course it’s difficult to convince small farmers to designate protected areas that they will lose for production purposes. In the long term, this would only work if they were to receive compensation payments. So the next step is to introduce agroforestry areas which improve the water regime and generate additional yield. 

Reforesting the entire basin of the Rio Doce and rehabilitating its 360,000 springs – that’s the dream of Sebastião Salgado and his wife. And that is quite a challenge: with a surface area of 90,000 square kilometres, the basin is as large as the whole of Portugal. “We will manage part of this task with the support of the KfW,” says the 80-year-old Salgado, who overcame his depression and has since produced large-scale nature photographic documentaries. “In this day and age we simply have to plant trees and cultivate species diversity if we are to live in peace in the world.”