Agrarian reform settlements in the Amazon: lessons learned to scale up restoration - Executive Summary

Assisted Natural Regeneration (ANR) is a set of practices aimed at improving and accelerating the recovery of ecosystems (Chazdon et al., 2023). To this end, techniques are employed to remove or reduce barriers to natural regeneration with minimal human intervention, such as the installation of fences or enrichment planting (Shono et al., 2020), positioning ANR as a promising solution for landscape and forest restoration at scale, especially in view of its low implementation cost.

Agrarian reform settlements, with significant presence in the Amazon, emerge as key components of restoration efforts in the region, both in terms of challenges faced and potential solution. These settlements concentrate about 15% of secondary vegetation areas mapped in the Amazon (Pinto et al., 2021; Guimarães et al., 2025), which highlights the strategic potential of these territories to boost natural regeneration through practices such as ANR.

To ensure the success of restoration initiatives that provide lasting benefits for both people and nature, the restoration process must incorporate social and economic aspects, with a participatory approach that addresses local motivations (Tedesco et al., 2023). With this focus, a partnership has been established between the project Promoting and Implementing Assisted Natural Regeneration in the States of Mato Grosso and Pará (Promovendo e Implementando a Regeneração Natural Assistida no Mato Grosso e Pará) and the Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores sem Terra - MST), aiming to promote forest restoration in agrarian reform settlements. The project – jointly carried out by WRI Brasil, Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazônia (Imazon) and Instituto Centro de Vida (ICV), with support from Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI) – aims to restore degraded forests in the Brazilian Amazon through the implementation of ANR in selected municipalities in these states. Additionally, MST is already committed to planting 100 million trees by 2030 and strengthening the production of healthy food in agrarian reform settlements and camps in Brazil, as established by the movement’s National Plan to Plant Trees, Produce Healthy Food (Plano Nacional Plantar Árvores, Produzir Alimentos Saudáveis), launched in 2020.

With common objectives, the partnership is focused on promoting restoration in five settlements in the state of Pará (Figure ES1), adopting two approaches based on the specific conditions of each territory: Assisted Natural Regeneration (ANR) and Agroforestry Systems (AFS1 ). These approaches, even when applied in different contexts, can complement each other in the promotion of social, economic and environmental benefits. The settlements already included several AFS areas before the beginning of the project, while natural regeneration (NR) areas, although numerous, lacked systematic ANR actions, such as enrichment with native species, protection against external interference and management aimed at accelerating ecological succession. Thus, the settlements showed potential for expansion of productive agroforestry arrangements and dissemination of ANR, enhancing these areas with technical and material contributions — such as training, inputs and infrastructure (fences, nurseries, etc.) — generated by the project. The partnership prioritized the adoption of a participatory approach that promoted an efficient and sustained restoration process, incorporating local objectives and motivations and integrating national or subnational restoration goals with benefits for local actors.