Raising Awareness about FLR Opportunities in Pará, Brazil

One actor in that effort is Gustavo Gatti, Director of Conserve Brasil, a Brazilian consulting firm. Conserve Brasil helped Imazon – a non-profit with decades of history working to conserve the Amazon rainforest – to define the key success factors of forest landscape restoration (FLR) in the Paragominas municipality and in the State of Pará, and to compile the restoration opportunities for the State of Pará.

Gustavo took the ELTI-IUCN course Forest Landscape Restoration in the Tropics to expand his capacity to develop and execute restoration strategies and assessments based on ROAM.

For Gustavo, the course’s timing was perfect. While he was participating in the lectures and online discussions, he was able to apply the subject matter to his consulting engagements.

It is very important to work at the landscape level. We should look at the potential for restoration to generate opportunities within a local economy. It’s more than reversing environmental damage, it’s encouraging a forest-based local economy that can lead to socio-economic development.

Gustavo Gatti

Since February 2016, Conserve Brasil has collaborated with Imazon on a project that culminated in the 2017 publication of two reports: Diagnosis of Key Success Factors for Forest Landscape Restoration in Paragominas and Opportunities for Forest Restoration in the State of Pará.

“The reports are both a contribution to restoration planning, and an effort to raise awareness among policy makers at the municipal and state levels,” says Gustavo. “We hope they will convince stakeholders to become more involved, to include components of ROAM in the broader planning process of restoration, and to incorporate Pará 2030 into Brazil’s commitment to the Bonn Challenge. Both publications were influenced by my participation in the ELTI-IUCN course.”