1 Apr 2025

With the help of Rio Grande do Sul’s government, the Reflora Project seeks to replant trees that were damaged or lost to the 2024 floods. We intend to plant 6,000 saplings in the areas that suffered the most!

On Friday 28th March, at the Piratini Palace in Porto Alegre, together with the government of Rio Grande do Sul, we officially gave the go-ahead to the Reflora Project, which aims to rescue the "DNA" of trees that are have been endangered or damaged by the floods that hit the state in 2024. They will then be replanted in the same place, but with genetic "clones" of the original tree. To this end, we are investing more than R$ 7.5 million.

The project will be carried out by the Federal University of Viçosa (UFV) and the Brazilian Corporation for Industrial Research and Innovation (Embrapii), and will last about three years, starting in June 2025. The idea is to plant 6,000 saplings of 30 native species in the areas that were heavily affected by the floods in Rio Grande do Sul. Work will begin in Guaíba, Barra do Ribeiro, Tapes, Rio Pardo, Butiá, Eldorado do Sul and Santa Maria.

What will we do? First, we'll locate trees that have damage at the base of their trunk and sample their "DNA" on site. To do this, we will retrieve ‘propagules’, which are pieces of the plant from which a new tree can grow. We save this material, plant it in a nursery and use a technique called "grafting". Grafting involves joining two different plants together so that they grow together as one. Finally, we plant the saplings in the field and wait for them to bloom. The good thing is that with this technique, the plant flowers between six to 12 months! Thus, we get seeds with a lot of genetic variety, ready to plant where old trees used to be.

Antonio Lacerda, Managing Director of CMPC Brazil, said: "This is a very important initiative and an opportunity to reforest more quickly and effectively the areas that were affected last year. In addition, this project allows us to improve how we produce and work with genetics in our nurseries, to have a greater variety of native trees that are already adapted to the conditions of each place."