Indigenous leaders in the Amazon are promoting reforestation through a new online learning program. Working in partnership with the Embrapa, Brazil’s Agricultural Research Agency, two tribal Chiefs launched an online course titled “Sowing forests on Indigenous lands.” The aims of the online course focus on collecting, germinating, and storing tree seeds, as well as showing how to build greenhouses to grow seedlings of local tree species, and later, how to plant them. The Embrapa says the aim is to encourage dozens of villages in the Amazon and elsewhere to plant one million trees a year.

From forest fires to illegal loggers, the Amazon Rainforest has been a major victim of deforestation and degradation. According to Time magazine, 17% of the Amazon has been deforested, meaning that 17% of the Amazon has been converted to non-forest uses such as agriculture or gold mining. Forest degradation, however, is a more gradual process in which the forest’s biomass and soil quality declines. Forest degradation usually precedes deforestation. Factors such as timber extraction, forest fires, droughts, and proximity to deforested areas all play a role in forest degradation. In a study shared by science.org, 38% of the Amazon is currently degraded. Indigenous leaders are looking to fix this.

Indigenous people make up 9.2% of the Amazonian population, with over 500 different groups, all of whom are at risk of losing their cultural way of life as a result of forest degradation and deforestation. Indigenous territories make up over half of the Amazon, and Indigenous leaders today are working together to fight forest degradation.

The initiative was launched by Chief Raoni Metuktire of the Kayapó people and Chief Almir of the Suruí, neither of whom are strangers to environmental protection. Raoni has been participating in international environmental campaigns since the late 1980s, and Almi has been using Google Earth since 2007 as a way to record instances of illegal logging and create cultural maps.

It is unlikely that this project would have been able to happen in years prior, as the previous president of Brazil from 2019 to 2022, Jair Bolsonaro, was a strong proponent of colonization of the Amazon. Under Bolsonaro, deforestation of the Amazon reached a 15-year high in 2021, the environment budget was cut by 24%, and environmental policymakers were replaced with military officials. Under the current president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a member of the Worker’s Party, deforestation dropped by 33.6% during the first six months of his term in 2023. The work of Indigenous leaders hand in hand with governmental agencies to promote reforestation not only physically replenishes the environment but also strengthens governmental trust and ties within the Indigenous communities, who have been victim to previous governmental oppression.