BLACK JAGUAR - Araguaia Biodiversity Corridor

The role of Fondazione Capellino

During 2023, Fondazione Capellino, after an assessment of the main reforestation projects in Brazil, made the decision to support the Black Jaguar project alongside the Instituto Black Jaguar (a foundation under Brazilian law) not as a sterile project sponsor, but as a co-leader who ensures - in addition to the support of field activities - primarily the transparency of the work, as well as the control, the collection of data, and above all a role of responsibility to ensure that the ambitious objectives in the medium and long term are concretely achievable.

The Foundation has taken responsibility, from 1 July 2023 until today, to guarantee at its own expense all the activities to verify the correctness and transparency of the Foundation's operations conducted by the Instituto Black Jaguar.

Control commission

Since July 2023, a Control Commission composed of environmental engineers, lawyers, accounting and biodiversity experts has been appointed to verify the effectiveness of the actions carried out by the Black Jaguar Foundation.

The Commission was given the task of monitoring the operations carried out in the field and verifying the formal correctness of the activity (fiscal, financial, legal, etc.) as well as the concrete implementation of the plan and the restoration techniques adopted. Black Jaguar was requested that the Commission have full access to all project information and carry out inspections in the intervention areas to monitor the completion of the activities.

State of the art of the Project at the current date:

- After an initial phase of documentary verification carried out by the Commission between July and October 2023, in November 2023 we ourselves from the Capellino Foundation went on an inspection with the Control Commission in the areas of reforestation operations and found a project that was still partially inefficient.

- The organization of field work, the activity segmented into small lots granted by the farmers, the investment in a stable nursery and the considerable logistical costs require a radical revision of the project. In these terms, today the creation of a biodiversity corridor along the 2,600 km of the Araguaia river is only an ambitious hypothesis, and does not correspond to an achievable objective, not only due to a question of available financial means, but due to the planning impossibility of create an ecologically continuous corridor even along a short stretch of the river. The narrative of the <<Araguaia Biodiversity Corridor – 2,600 km long and 40 km wide>> project should therefore be modified to make it more objective with respect to what is actually achieved and how the project is actually conducted in the identified territory.

- Furthermore, after 6 months of activity by the Control Commission, Instituto Black Jaguar has not been able to clearly illustrate how the number of trees planted can be verified in a precise and irrefutable manner and how exactly it tracks this information. The same uncertainty also applies to the evaluation of the total number of hectares restored.

- From 1 January 2024, faced with the findings of the Control Commission mentioned above, we had to suspend our contribution while awaiting a timely redefinition of the project activities, on which the Foundation is actively working, on both a political and technical level, also with the support of the Brazilian government in the person of the Minister of the Environment Marina Silva (whom we met last November 2023).

- Fondazione Capellino intends to bring proposals for review and modification of the project to the Instituto Black Jaguar so that - also through legislative initiatives - we can give concreteness and coherence to the project ambition of bringing biodiversity back along the Rio Araguaia.  In any case, the Foundation does not abdicate its contractual role as guarantor of the transparency of the project, and will continue to report the evolution of the project on its website and on that of Black Jaguar.

- Furthermore, during 2024 the Control Commission worked to create the political and legislative conditions for the creation of Biodiversity corridors that combat deforestation, drought and arson.

Our partners

Instituto Black Jaguar is a non-profit organization under Brazilian law, which works for the reforestation of the Amazon rainforest and the Cerrado savannah, in Brazil.