Ricardo Rodrigues, Bernardo Strassburg and Thiago Picolo of re.green (Photo: Leo Pinheiro/Valor)Carbon Herald | 23 January 2025Microsoft and re.green sign a second deal on Amazon and Atlantic forests restoration
by Sasha Ranevska
Bioflora nursery at Piracicaba-São Paulo. Image courtesy of re.green
Tech giant Microsoft has expanded its collaboration with carbon dioxide removal (CDR) provider re.green, signing a second offtake agreement with the Brazil-based company.
Under the new deal, Microsoft will purchase nearly 3.5 million metric tonnes of CO2, brining the total of their shared efforts to 6.5 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent to be removed over the course of this project.
re.green specializes in ecological restoration, offering high-quality carbon offsets from its operations. Through its two agreements with Microsoft, the company will work on restoring a total of 33,000 hectares of land in parts of the Amazon and Atlantic forests.
The partners are already making strides in Brazil, revitalizing lands in some of the most biodiverse biomes in the world.
To date, their collaboration, launched in May 2024, has resulted in the planting of more than 4.4 million native species seedlings of 80 different varieties over a territory of 11,000 hectares of degraded or abandoned pasture lands.
The partnership will now focus on three main areas: western Maranhão and eastern Pará in the Amazon Forest and southern Bahia and Vale do Paraíba (along with parts of Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais) in the Atlantic Forest.
Looking to restore and conserve the ecological balance in these regions, the initiative hopes to improve the structural and functional connectivity on a landscape level, enabling a flow of species, genetic diversity, and vital processes like seed dispersal and pollination.
This collaboration will also introduce benefits for the local communities that inhabit these sites.
So far, over 230 people have been directly employed in restoration efforts, gaining skills in seed collection, native bee honey production, and wildfire prevention through training programs.
Additionally, re.green has boosted the local economy by partnering with 29 local native seedlings nurseries
Marcelo Medeiros, Chairman and Co-Founder of re.green, commented, “This second agreement with Microsoft signals a maturing ecological restoration sector and underscores re.green’s commitment to its founding mission: to advance science-led large-scale tropical forest restoration benefiting climate, biodiversity, and local communities.”
