Professor Pedro Brancalion

I have three main current positions: professor at the Department of Forest Sciences and Director of Innovation of the Center for Carbon Research in Tropical Agriculture, both at the University of São Paulo, and partner at and scientist at re.green, a large-scale restoration company. I’m an agronomist by training and restoration ecologist, focused on co-developing cost-effective solutions to conserve and restore tropical forests. In the past 20 years, I have dedicated my career to understand the ecological mechanisms and socio-economic factors driving successful restoration, as well developing solutions in partnership with different stakeholder groups to transform ecological restoration in a competitive land use. Most of my projects are in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil, but have also research in the Cerrado and Amazon, as well have performed global analysis on different restoration topics.

I have initiated my career working with land use planning and restoration of environmentally fragile areas to enable agricultural and forestry companies to comply with environmental laws, then started to collaborate with governments, NGOs and coalitions to develop restoration programs for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services provisioning and, lately, and have had a core focus on enabling forest restoration for carbon credits generation. And in the weekends, I manage my own restoration areas in my farm. In the past few years, I have expanded my portfolio of activities from traditional scientific projects to research, development, and innovation initiatives, trying to speed up the transformative changes needed to scale up restoration and deliver benefits for nature and people.