Brazil, 13 March 2026 — Forest Trends’ Communities and Territorial Governance Initiative (CTGI) is advancing an integrated landscape restoration and agroforestry strategy across the Ribeira and Paraíba Valleys of Brazil’s Atlantic Rainforest—one of the world’s most biodiverse and historically threatened tropical biomes, with only approximately 12 percent of its original cover remaining. In partnership with Digital Green, the program has also piloted responsible digital innovation for family farmers, Indigenous Peoples, and traditional communities at the center of this work.
This work reflects CTGI’s long-term institutional presence in these landscapes and its commitment to community-led governance as the foundation of durable restoration.
Landscape Restoration at Scale
Since its inception, CTGI has achieved the following outcomes across the two valleys:
- 785+ hectares restored across 149 distinct sites within the Atlantic Forest biome
- Nearly 950,000 native trees planted, forest enrichment, and community nursery operations
- 13 agroforestry systems established, diversifying production while restoring ecological function
- 138 farming, Indigenous, and traditional families engaged as direct participants in restoration, seed collection, and agroforestry management
- Two community-managed nurseries (one per valley), strengthening local autonomy across the native seedling supply chain
- Over 1.2 million Brazilian real (R) in regional economic value generated through local procurement of inputs, technical services, seed collection, and restoration labor
These outcomes reflect a deliberate strategy of embedding restoration within existing community governance structures—structures built and maintained by Indigenous, quilombola, and rural families, who are the primary stewards of these landscapes. CTGI’s model ensures that ecological and economic value flows directly to these communities, reinforcing territorial rights alongside ecological recovery.
Territorial Strategy: Ribeira and Paraíba Valleys
CTGI applied differentiated approaches calibrated to the ecological and social character of each territory. In the Ribeira Valley, restoration efforts have centered on forest enrichment and the expansion of juçara palm (Euterpe edulis) systems—a keystone Atlantic Forest species and critical food source for frugivorous fauna. Indigenous and quilombola communities have played a central role in seed collection, planting, and ecological monitoring, drawing on longstanding territorial knowledge to guide species selection and site prioritization.
In the Paraíba Valley, the program has focused on consolidating Agroforestry Reference Units (Unidades de Referência em Agroflorestas), strengthening rural settlements in ecological transition, and advancing technical analyses that explore long-term environmental finance pathways and landscape investment mechanisms to support the program’s sustainability over time. Across both territories, implementation is structured through multi-stakeholder partnerships, including cooperatives, academic institutions, and public agencies. This reinforces a model of distributed territorial governance in which community actors hold a primary coordinating role.
Digital Innovation in Service of Community Extension
Within its established restoration and agroforestry platform, CTGI partnered with Digital Green to pilot FarmerChat, an AI-powered agricultural advisory tool developed by Digital Green, designed to extend access to restoration and agroforestry knowledge for family farmers, students, and community extension practitioners.
The initial pilot phase registered more than 110 users and generated over 200 analyzed interactions, informing iterative improvements to the platform’s contextual accuracy, usability, and response quality for Portuguese-speaking rural users. Throughout, the pilot has been designed to complement field-based technical assistance, ensuring that digital tools function as an extension of, rather than a substitute for, the community-embedded relationships that make restoration programming effective.
“The progress we have achieved across the Ribeira and Paraíba Valleys demonstrates that community-led restoration, when properly resourced, governed by the communities themselves, and grounded in long-term territorial relationships, delivers both ecological integrity and tangible benefit for the families at the center of the work,” said Beto Borges, Director of Forest Trends’ Communities and Territorial Governance Initiative. “Digital tools have a role to play in extending that reach, but the foundation will always be community governance and the knowledge systems of the peoples who have cared for these landscapes for generations.”
“FarmerChat is built on the principle that family farmers deserve access to the same quality of agricultural guidance as any professional advisor,” said Juan-Pablo Giraldo, Lead Program Manager at Digital Green. “Being embedded within a community-governed, territorially-grounded program like CTGI gives us the context we need to make AI-powered advisory genuinely useful and trustworthy in the field.”
Outlook and Institutional Significance
The convergence of verified restoration outcomes, territorial governance infrastructure, and responsible digital innovation positions Forest Trends’ CTGI program as a replicable model for community-led landscape management across the Atlantic Forest and analogous biomes in the Global South. As public institutions, philanthropic funders, and private actors with long-term sustainability commitments increasingly seek community-grounded approaches to landscape restoration, CTGI’s architecture—grounded in measurable impact, equitable benefit sharing, transparent governance, and deep territorial presence—offers the institutional credibility and methodological rigor that durable sustainable finance arrangements require.
Forest Trends’ CTGI is actively building pathways to deepen and scale its restoration and territorial governance work across additional landscapes in the coming program cycle. Working with Digital Green and other collaborators, the initiative continues to explore how digital tools can responsibly expand knowledge access for the communities leading this work.
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Forest Trends is a civil society organization that works to conserve forests and natural ecosystems by promoting nature-based solutions, sustainable economies, and climate justice. Through its Communities and Territorial Governance Initiative (CTGI), Forest Trends has worked for over two decades in partnership with Indigenous Peoples and traditional communities to strengthen territorial governance, cultural preservation, and equitable access to climate finance. CTGI has a strong presence across Latin America and extensive experience in pioneering projects that intersect conservation, forest-based economies, and community leadership.
Digital Green is a global tech nonprofit organization using the power of generative AI to help small-scale farmers around the world improve their productivity and incomes. Digital Green began in 2008 with a farmer-to-farmer video model that transformed agricultural advisory. Today, they develop open sourced, farmer-powered AI tools like FarmerChat, their AI agricultural assistant, that integrate with public systems, respond to local needs, and make climate-smart guidance accessible to farmers via image, voice, and text, in real time, and in their own language.. www.digitalgreen.org.