Brazil's Cerrado restoration hits $1.24B milestone as conservation meets commerce

Bruno Coutinho stood on a dusty road in southwestern Brazil and wept. The biologist and geographer had spent years designing landscapes on computer screens at Conservation International, mapping pixels and coordinates in a small São Paulo office. But this particular map had become real. The road beneath his feet, once a line on a monitor, now curved steeply along a river valley. Around him, the Cerrado—a vast mosaic of savanna and woodland that sprawls across a quarter of Brazil—was returning to life. Trees and shrubs pushed up through old pasture grass, their canopy slowly closing overhead.

Mark Wishnie of BTG Pactual, the Brazilian investment firm that had engineered this transformation, watched Coutinho from nearby. "We've all worked on projects where you have a beautiful idea," Wishnie said later. "But it doesn't necessarily ever come to fruition exactly as you think." This one had. This month, BTG Pactual's Timberland Investment Group closed its fund to new investors after securing $1.24 billion—capital that will flow directly into restoring and protecting degraded land across Brazil and Uruguay, alongside sustainable tree farms. What had existed three years ago only as lines on a map was now becoming a working landscape.

The partnership between Conservation International and BTG Pactual TIG was audacious and risky on both sides. For the conservation organization, the gamble was reputational: could a for-profit timberland investor genuinely serve nature? For the investment firm, it meant opening its core decisions to meaningful input from a conservation partner. What emerged instead was trust, and a financial model that proved commerce and conservation could thrive together. The Cerrado harbors five percent of the world's species, yet more than half of it is already gone. An estimated 60 million hectares of Brazilian pasture are degraded—an area nearly half the size of Peru—cleared for cattle and soy, overrun with invasive grasses, exhausted by decades of overgrazing. Restoring such land is expensive, requiring work across entire landscapes over decades, with costs reaching thousands of dollars per hectare. Philanthropy and governments cannot move fast enough to close the funding gap. Conservation International saw an opportunity where others saw only worn-out soil: a chance to inject over $1 billion toward restoration by working with a timberland investor.

The model is elegantly simple and financially sophisticated. BTG Pactual TIG replaces degraded cattle pasture with 50 percent sustainably certified eucalyptus for timber production and 50 percent native Cerrado restoration. Both generate carbon credits—tradeable certificates that companies purchase to offset emissions. Credits from restored native woodlands command higher prices than those from timber plantations because the carbon stored in a biodiverse forest is considered more permanent and ecologically valuable. By combining the two, the investment firm created a system where restoring nature makes the entire portfolio more attractive to large institutional investors who can fund restoration at scale. The eucalyptus grows with assembly-line precision, saplings deposited at exact intervals across the landscape. Thanks to decades of careful cultivation, the trees will be ready for harvest in seven to fifteen years—the longer rotation storing more carbon both while alive and after cutting into solid wood products like furniture.

The restoration effort has moved forward with equal vigor, guided at each step by Conservation International. According to the Brazil Restoration Observatory, just 14,000 hectares had ever been reported under restoration in Mato Grosso do Sul state. In just two years, BTG Pactual TIG and Conservation International have nearly doubled that amount, restoring 33 farms totaling 80,000 hectares, with half dedicated to conservation and restoration. As the woodland has returned, so has the wildlife. Camera traps have recorded jaguars moving through savanna that was cattle pasture three years ago, maned wolves foraging at dusk, and researchers have identified more than 1,000 species across the properties. Three are globally threatened: a freshwater catfish, a Chaco eagle, and an endangered cottontail rabbit that requires intact forest cover.

The hard work begins underground. The Cerrado's soil is the oldest in Brazil, sitting undisturbed on one of Earth's most ancient pieces of continental crust. Over eons, as other landscapes underwent upheaval from volcanic activity and glaciation, these soils slowly leached nutrients. Native plants adapted by sending roots over 30 feet deep to access water and nutrients far below. But modern farming replaced these deep-rooted natives with Brachiaria, an African grass introduced to feed cattle. Shallow-rooted and fast-growing, it is the opposite of everything that evolved here, and once established, it releases chemicals that prevent native seeds from germinating. To understand what they were working with, the team flew drones equipped with LiDAR sensors across every hectare, building maps at sub-centimeter resolution. Every pixel was classified by vegetation height and density, every patch of surviving native growth identified, every stretch of Brachiaria-choked pasture mapped and measured. From those maps, every hectare received a prescription.

Where native trees had already taken hold, particularly along river corridors, the directive was to remove cattle, prevent wildfires, and step back. In some places, it worked dramatically—one riparian corridor went from cattle pasture in 2023 to head-high vegetation by the time Wishnie visited. But not every hectare cooperated. Where Brachiaria still dominated, the team employed precision weed control targeting the invasive grass to give native plants a fighting chance. Where young seedlings struggled, they managed leaf-cutter ant populations just long enough for new growth to mature and toughen. Where land was most degraded, workers planted native seedlings by hand, grown from seeds gathered by local community members and supplied from a local nursery. "The lessons learned don't stop at the property line," Wishnie said. "What we're proving in the Cerrado—that this can work, that it can scale, that it can pay for itself—that's applicable anywhere people are willing to try." In old pastures drawn on a map in a small office, the woodlands are blooming once again, rustling with birdsongs, a corner of the Cerrado on the mend.