Inside the controversial tree farms powering Apple’s carbon neutral goal

We were losing the light, and still about 20 kilometers from the main road, when the car shuddered and died at the edge of a strange forest. 

The grove grew as if indifferent to certain unspoken rules of botany. There was no understory, no foreground or background, only the trees themselves, which grew as a wall of bare trunks that rose 100 feet or so before concluding with a burst of thick foliage near the top. The rows of trees ran perhaps the length of a New York City block and fell away abruptly on either side into untidy fields of dirt and grass. The vista recalled the husk of a failed condo development, its first apartments marooned when the builders ran out of cash.

Standing there against the setting sun, the trees were, in their odd way, also rather stunning. I had no service out here—we had just left a remote nature preserve in southwestern Brazil—but I reached for my phone anyway, for a picture. The concern on the face of my travel partner, Clariana Vilela Borzone, a geographer and translator who grew up nearby, flicked to amusement. My camera roll was already full of eucalyptus.

The trees sprouted from every hillside, along every road, and more always seemed to be coming. Across the dirt path where we were stopped, another pasture had been cleared for planting. The sparse bushes and trees that had once shaded cattle in the fields had been toppled and piled up, as if in a Pleistocene gravesite. 

Borzone’s friends and neighbors were divided on the aesthetics of these groves. Some liked the order and eternal verdancy they brought to their slice of the Cerrado, a large botanical region that arcs diagonally across Brazil’s midsection. Its native savanna landscape was largely gnarled, low-slung, and, for much of the year, rather brown. And since most of that flora had been cleared decades ago for cattle pasture, it was browner and flatter still. Now that land was becoming trees. It was becoming beautiful. 

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Others considered this beauty a mirage. “Green deserts,” they called the groves, suggesting bounty from afar but holding only dirt and silence within. These were not actually forests teeming with animals and undergrowth, they charged, but at best tinder for a future megafire in a land parched, in part, by their vigorous growth. This was in fact a common complaint across Latin America: in Chile, the planted rows of eucalyptus were called the “green soldiers.” It was easy to imagine getting lost in the timber, a funhouse mirror of trunks as far as the eye could see.

The timber companies that planted these trees push back on these criticisms as caricatures of a genus that’s demonized all over the world. They point to their sustainable forestry certifications and their handsome spending on fire suppression, and to the microphones they’ve placed that record cacophonies of birds and prove the groves are anything but barren. Whether people like the look of these trees or not, they are meeting a human need, filling an insatiable demand for paper and pulp products all over the world. Much of the material for the world’s toilet and tissue paper is grown in Brazil, and that, they argue, is a good thing: Grow fast and furious here, as responsibly as possible, to save many more trees elsewhere. 

But I was in this region for a different reason: Apple. And also Microsoft and Meta and TSMC, and many smaller technology firms too. I was here because tech executives many thousands of miles away were racing toward, and in some cases stumbling, on their way to meet their climate promises—too little time, and too much demand for new devices and AI data centers. Not far from here, they had struck some of the largest-ever deals for carbon credits. They were asking something new of this tree: Could Latin America’s eucalyptus be a scalable climate solution? 

On a practical level, the answer seemed straightforward. Nobody disputed how swiftly or reliably eucalyptus could grow in the tropics. This knowledge was the product of decades of scientific study and tabulations of biomass for wood or paper. Each tree was roughly 47% carbon, which meant that many tons of it could be stored within every planted hectare. This could be observed taking place in real time, in the trees by the road. Come back and look at these young trees tomorrow, and you’d see it: fresh millimeters of carbon, chains of cellulose set into lignin. 

At the same time, Apple and the others were also investing in an industry, and a tree, with a long and controversial history in this part of Brazil and elsewhere. They were exerting their wealth and technological oversight to try to make timber operations more sustainable, more supportive of native flora, and less water intensive. Still, that was a hard sell to some here, where hundreds of thousands of hectares of pasture are already in line for planting; more trees were a bleak prospect in a land increasingly racked by drought and fire. Critics called the entire exercise an excuse to plant even more trees for profit. 

Borzone and I did not plan to stay and watch the eucalyptus grow. Garden or forest or desert, ally or antagonist—it did not matter much with the stars of the Southern Cross emerging and our gas tank empty. We gathered our things from our car and set off down the dirt road through the trees.

A big promise

My journey into the Cerrado had begun months earlier, in the fall of 2023, when the actress Octavia Spencer appeared as Mother Nature in an ad alongside Apple CEO Tim Cook. In 2020, the company had set a goal to go “net zero” by the end of the decade, at which point all of its products—laptops, CPUs, phones, earbuds—would be produced without increasing the level of carbon in the atmosphere. “Who wants to disappoint me first?” Mother Nature asked with a sly smile. It was a third of the way to 2030—a date embraced by many corporations aiming to stay in line with the UN’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 °C over preindustrial levels—and where was the progress?

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Cook was glad to inform her of the good news: The new Apple Watch was leading the way. A limited supply of the devices were already carbon neutral, thanks to things like recycled materials and parts that were specially sent by ship—not flown—from one factory to another. These special watches were labeled with a green leaf on Apple’s iconically soft, white boxes.

Critics were quick to point out that declaring an individual product “carbon neutral” while the company was still polluting had the whiff of an early victory lap, achieved with some convenient accounting. But the work on the watch spoke to the company’s grand ambitions. Apple claimed that changes like procuring renewable power and using recycled materials had enabled it to cut emissions 75% since 2015. “We’re always prioritizing reductions; they’ve got to come first,” Chris Busch, Apple’s director of environmental initiatives, told me soon after the launch. 

The company also acknowledged that it could not find reductions to balance all its emissions. But it was trying something new. 

Since the 1990s, companies have purchased carbon credits based largely on avoiding emissions. Take some patch of forest that was destined for destruction and protect it; the stored carbon that wasn’t lost is turned into credits. But as the carbon market expanded, so did suspicion of carbon math—in some cases, because of fraud or bad science, but also because efforts to contain deforestation are often frustrated, with destruction avoided in one place simply happening someplace else. Corporations that once counted on carbon credits for “avoided” emissions can no longer trust them. (Many consumers feel they can’t either, with some even suing Apple over the ways it used past carbon projects to make its claims about the Apple Watch.)

But that demand to cancel out carbon dioxide hasn’t gone anywhere—if anything, as AI-driven emissions knock some companies off track from reaching their carbon targets (and raise questions about the techniques used to claim emissions reductions), the need is growing. For Apple, even under the rosiest assumptions about how much it will continue to pollute, the gap is significant: In 2024, the company reported offsetting 700,000 metric tons of CO₂, but the number it will need to hit in 2030 to meet its goals is 9.6 million. 

So the new move is to invest in carbon “removal” rather than avoidance. The idea implies a more solid achievement: taking carbon molecules out of the atmosphere. There are many ways to attempt that, from trying to change the pH of the oceans so that they absorb more of the molecules to building machines that suck carbon straight out of the air. But these are long-term fixes. None of these technologies work at the scale and price that would help Apple and others meet their shorter-term targets. For that, trees have emerged again as the answer. This time the idea is to plant new ones instead of protecting old ones. 

To expand those efforts in a way that would make a meaningful dent in emissions, Apple determined, it would also need to make carbon removal profitable. A big part of this effort would be driven by the Restore Fund, a $200 million partnership with Goldman Sachs and Conservation International, a US environmental nonprofit, to invest in “high quality” projects that promoted reforestation on degraded lands.  

Profits would come from responsibly turning trees into products, Goldman’s head of sustainability explained when the fund was announced in 2021. But it was also an opportunity for Apple, and future investors, to “almost look at, touch, and feel their carbon,” he said—a concreteness that carbon credits had previously failed to offer. “The aim is to generate real, measurable carbon benefits, but to do that alongside financial returns,” Busch told me. It was intended as a flywheel of sorts: more investors, more planting, more carbon—an approach to climate action that looked to abundance rather than sacrifice.

Apple markets its watch as a carbon-neutral product, a claim based in part on the use of carbon credits.

The announcement of the carbon-neutral Apple Watch was the occasion to promote the Restore Fund’s three initial investments, which included a native forestry project as well as eucalyptus farms in Paraguay and Brazil. The Brazilian timber plans were by far the largest in scale, and were managed by BTG Pactual, Latin America’s largest investment bank. 

Busch connected me with Mark Wishnie, head of sustainability for Timberland Investment Group, BTG’s US-based subsidiary, which acquires and manages properties on behalf of institutional investors. After years in the eucalyptus business, Wishnie, who lives in Seattle, was used to strong feelings about the tree. It’s just that kind of plant—heralded as useful, even ornamental; demonized as a fire starter, water-intensive, a weed. “Has the idea that eucalyptus is invasive come up?” he asked pointedly. (It’s an “exotic” species in Brazil, yes, but the risk of invasiveness is low for the varieties most commonly planted for forestry.) He invited detractors to consider the alternative to the scale and efficiency of eucalyptus, which, he pointed out, relieves the pressure that humans put on beloved old-growth forests elsewhere. 

Using eucalyptus for carbon removal also offered a new opportunity. Wishnie was overseeing a planned $1 billion initiative that was set to transform BTG’s timber portfolio; it aimed at a 50-50 split between timber and native restoration on old pastureland, with an emphasis on connecting habitats along rivers and streams. As a “high quality” project, it was meant to do better than business as usual. The conservation areas would exceed the legal requirements for native preservation in Brazil, which range from 20% to 35% in the Cerrado. In a part of Brazil that historically gets little conservation attention, it would potentially represent the largest effort yet to actually bring back the native landscape. 

When BTG approached Conservation International with the 50% figure, the organization thought it was “too good to be true,” Miguel Calmon, the senior director of the nonprofit’s Brazilian programs, told me. With the restoration work paid for by the green financing and the sale of carbon credits, scale and longevity could be achieved. “Some folks may do this, but they never do this as part of the business,” he said. “It comes from not a corporate responsibility. It’s about, really, the business that you can optimize.”

So far, BTG has raised $630 million for the initiative and earmarked 270,000 hectares, an area more than double the city of Los Angeles. The first farm in the plan, located on a 24,000-hectare cattle ranch, was called Project Alpha. The location, Wishnie said, was confidential. 

COURTESY OF BTG

But a property of that size sticks out, even in a land of large farms. It didn’t take very much digging into municipal land records in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul, where many of the company’s Cerrado holdings are located, to turn up a recently sold farm that matched the size. It was called Fazenda Engano, or “Deception Farm”—hence the rebrand. The land was registered to an LLC with links to holding companies for other BTG eucalyptus plantations located in a neighboring region that locals had taken to calling the Cellulose Valley for its fast-expanding tree farms and pulp factories.  

The area was largely seen as a land of opportunity, even as some locals had raised the alarm over concerns that the land couldn’t handle the trees. They had allies in prominent ecologists who have long questioned the wisdom of tree-planting in the Cerrado—and increasingly spar with other conservationists who see great potential in turning pasture into forest. The fight has only gotten more heated as more investors hunt for new climate solutions. 

Still, where Apple goes, others often follow. And when it comes to sustainability, other companies look to it as a leader. I wasn’t sure if I could visit Project Alpha and see whether Apple and its partners had really found a better way to plant, but I started making plans to go to the Cerrado anyway, to see the forests behind those little green leaves on the box. 

Complex calculations

In 2015, a study by Thomas Crowther, an ecologist then at ETH Zürich, attempted a census of global tree cover, finding more than 3 trillion trees in all. A useful number, surprisingly hard to divine, like counting insects or bacteria. 

A follow-up study a few years later proved more controversial: Earth’s surface held space for at least 1 trillion more trees. That represented a chance to store 200 metric gigatons, or about 25%, of atmospheric carbon once they matured. (The paper was later corrected in multiple ways, including an acknowledgment that the carbon storage potential could be about one-third less.)

The study became a media sensation, soon followed by a fleet of tree-planting initiatives with “trillion” in the name—most prominently through a World Economic Forum effort launched by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at Davos, which President Donald Trump pledged to support during his first term. 

But for as long as tree planting has been heralded as a good deed—from Johnny Appleseed to programs that promise a tree for every shoe or laptop purchased—the act has also been chased closely by a follow-up question: How many of those trees survive? Consider Trump’s most notable planting, which placed an oak on the White House grounds in 2018. It died just over a year later. 

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To critics, including Bill Gates, the efforts were symbolic of short-term thinking at the expense of deeper efforts to cut or remove carbon. (Gates’s spat with Benioff descended to name-calling in the New York Times. “Are we the science people or are we the idiots?” he asked.) The lifespan of a tree, after all, is brief—a pit stop—compared with the thousand-year carbon cycle, so its progeny must carry the torch to meaningfully cancel out emissions. Most don’t last that long. 

“The number of trees planted has become a kind of currency, but it’s meaningless,” Pedro Brancalion, a professor of tropical forestry at the University of São Paulo, told me. He had nothing against the trees, which the world could, in general, use a lot more of. But to him, a lot of efforts were riding more on “good vibes” than on careful strategy. 

Soon after arriving in São Paulo last summer, I drove some 150 miles into the hills outside the city to see the outdoor lab Brancalion has filled with experiments on how to plant trees better: trees given too many nutrients or too little; saplings monitored with wires and tubes like ICU admits, or skirted with tarps that snatch away rainwater. At the center of one of Brancalion’s plots stands a tower topped with a whirling station, the size of a hobby drone, monitoring carbon going in and out of the air (and, therefore, the nearby vegetation)—a molecular tango known as flux. 

Brancalion works part-time for a carbon-focused restoration company, Re:Green, which had recently sold 3 million carbon credits to Microsoft and was raising a mix of native trees in parts of the Amazon and the Atlantic Forest. While most of the trees in his lab were native ones too, like jacaranda and brazilwood, he also studies eucalyptus. The lab in fact sat on a former eucalyptus farm; in the heart of his fields, a grove of 80-year-old trees dripped bark like molting reptiles. 

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Eucalyptus planting swelled dramatically under Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1960s. The goal was self-sufficiency—a nation’s worth of timber and charcoal, quickly—and the expansion was fraught. Many opinions of the tree were forged in a spate of dubious land seizures followed by clearing of the existing vegetation—disputes that, in some places, linger to this day. Still, that campaign is also said to have done just as Wishnie described, easing the demand that would have been put on regions like the Amazon as Rio and São Paulo were built. 

The new trees also laid the foundation for Brazil to become a global hub for engineered forestry; it’s currently home to about a third of the world’s farmed eucalyptus. Today’s saplings are the products of decades of tinkering with clonal breeding, growing quick and straight, resistant to pestilence and drought, with exacting growth curves that chart biomass over time: Seven years to maturity is standard for pulp. Trees planted today grow more than three times as fast as their ancestors. 

If the goal is a trillion trees, or many millions of tons of carbon, no business is better suited to keeping count than timber. It might sound strange to claim carbon credits for trees that you plan to chop down and turn into toilet paper or chairs. Whatever carbon is stored in those ephemeral products is, of course, a blip compared with the millennia that CO₂ hangs in the atmosphere. 

But these carbon projects take a longer view. While individual trees may go, more trees are planted. The forest constantly regrows and recaptures carbon from the air. Credits are issued annually over decades, so long as the long-term average of the carbon stored in the grove continues to increase. What’s more, because the timber is constantly being tracked, the carbon is easy to measure, solving a key problem with carbon credits. 

Most mature native ecosystems, whether tropical forests or grasslands, will eventually store more carbon than a tree farm. But that could take decades. Eucalyptus can be planted immediately, with great speed, and the first carbon credits are issued in just a few years. “It fits a corporate model very well, and it fits the verification model very well,” said Robin Chazdon, a forest researcher at Australia’s University of the Sunshine Coast.

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Reliability and stability have also made eucalyptus, as well as pine, quietly dominant in global planting efforts. A 2019 analysis published in Nature found that 45% of carbon removal projects the researchers studied worldwide involved single-species tree farms. In Brazil, the figure was 82%. The authors called this a “scandal,” accusing environmental organizations and financiers of misleading the public and pursuing speed and convenience at the expense of native restoration.  

In 2023, the nonprofit Verra, the largest bearer of carbon credit standards, said it would forbid projects using “non-native monocultures”—that is, plants like eucalyptus or pine that don’t naturally grow in the places where they’re being farmed. The idea was to assuage concerns that carbon credits were going to plantations that would have been built anyway given the demand for wood, meaning they wouldn’t actually remove any extra carbon from the atmosphere.

The uproar was immediate—from timber companies, but also from carbon developers and NGOs. How would it be possible to scale anything—conservation, carbon removal—without them?

Verra reversed course several months later. It would allow non-native monocultures so long as they grew in land that was deemed “degraded,” or previously cleared of vegetation—land like cattle pasture. And it took steps to avoid counting plantings in close proximity to other areas of fast tree growth, the idea being that they wanted to avoid rewarding purely industrial projects that would’ve been planted anyway. 

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Brancalion happened to agree with the criticisms of exotic monocultures. But all the same, he believed eucalyptus had been unfairly demonized. It was a marvelous genus, actually, with nearly 800 species with unique adaptations. Natives could be planted as monocultures too, or on stolen land, or tended with little care. He had been testing ways to turn eucalyptus from perceived foes into friends of native forest restoration.

His idea was to use rows of eucalyptus, which rocket above native species, as a kind of stabilizer. While these natives can be valuable—either as lumber or for biodiversity—they may grow slowly, or twist in ways that make their wood unprofitable, or suddenly and inexplicably die. It’s never like that with eucalyptus, which are wonderfully predictable growers. Eventually, their harvested wood would help pay for the hard work of growing the others. 

In practice, foresters have generally preferred to keep things separate. Eucalyptus here; restoration there. It was far more efficient. The approach was emblematic, Brancalion thought, of letting the economics of the industry guide what was planted, how, and where, even with green finance involved. Though he admitted he was speaking as something of a competitor given his own carbon work, he was perplexed by Apple’s choices. The world’s richest company was doing eucalyptus? And with a bank better known locally as a major investor in industries, like beef and soy, that contributed to deforestation than any efforts for native restoration.

It also worried him to see the planting happening west of here, in the Cerrado, where land is cheaper and also, for much of the year, drier. “It’s like a bomb,” Brancalion told me. “You can come interview me in five, six years. You don’t have to be super smart to realize what will happen after planting too many eucalyptus in a dry region.” He wished me luck on my journey westward.   

The sacrifice zone

Savanna implies openness, but the European settlers passing through the Cerrado called it the opposite; the name literally means “closed.” Grasses and shrubs grow to chest height, scaled as if to maximize human inconvenience. A machete is advised. 

As I headed with Borzone toward a small nature preserve called Parque do Pombo, she told me that young Brazilians are often raised with a sense of dislike, if not fear, of this land. When Borzone texted her mother, a local biologist, to say where we were going, she replied: “I hear that place is full of ticks.” (Her intel, it turned out, was correct.)

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What can be easy to miss is the fantastic variety of these plants, the result of natural selection cranked into overdrive. Species, many of which blew in from the Amazon, survived by growing deep roots through the acidic soil and thicker bark to resist regular brush fires. Many of the trees developed the ability to shrivel upon themselves and drop their leaves during the long, dry winter. Some call it a forest that has grown upside down, because much of the growth occurs in the roots. The Cerrado is home to 12,000 flowering plant species, 4,000 of which are found only there. In terms of biodiversity, it is second in the world only to its more famous neighbor, the Amazon. 

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Each stop on our drive seemed to yield a new treasure for Borzone to show me: Guavira, a tree that bears fruit in grape-like bunches that appear only two weeks in a year; it can be made into a jam that is exceptionally good on toast. Pequi, more divisive, like fermented mango mixed with cheese. Others bear names Borzone can only faintly recall in the Indigenous Guaraní language and is thus unable to google. Certain uses are more memorable: Give this one here, a tiny frond that looks like a miniature Christmas fir, to make someone get pregnant.

Borzone had grown up in the heart of the savanna, and the land had changed significantly since she was a kid going to the river every weekend with her family. Since the 1970s, about half of the savanna has been cleared, mostly for ranching and, where the soil is good, soybeans. At that time, even prominent ecologists, fearing total destruction of the Amazon, advocated moving industry here, invoking what Brazilians call the boi de piranha—a myth about casting a cow into infested waters so that the other cows could ford downstream. 

Toby Pennington, a Cerrado ecologist at the University of Exeter, told me it remains a sacrificial zone, at times faring worse when environmentally minded politicians are in power. In 2023, when deforestation fell by half in the Amazon, it rose by 43% in the Cerrado. Some ecologists warn that this ecosystem could be entirely gone in the next decade.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s a certain prickliness among grassland researchers, who are, like their chosen flora, used to being trampled. In 2019, 46 of them authored a response in Science to Crowther’s trillion-trees study, arguing not about tree counting but about the land he proposed for reforestation. Much of it, they argued, including places like the Cerrado, was not appropriate for so many trees. It was too much biomass for the land to handle. (If their point was not already clear, the scientists later labeled the phenomenon “biome awareness disparity,” or BAD.)

“It’s a controversial ecosystem,” said Natashi Pilon, a grassland ecologist at the University of Campinas near São Paulo. “With Cerrado, you have to forget everything that you learn about ecology, because it’s all based in forest ecology. In the Cerrado, everything works the opposite way. Burning? It’s good. Shade? It’s not good.” The Cerrado contains a vast range of landscapes, from grassy fields to wooded forests, but the majority of it, she explained, is poorly suited to certain rules of carbon finance that would incentivize people to protect or restore it. While the underground forest stores plenty of carbon, it builds up its stock slowly and can be difficult to measure. 

The result is a slightly uncomfortable position for ecologists studying and trying to protect a vanishing landscape. Pilon and her former academic advisor, Giselda Durigan, a Cerrado ecologist at the Environmental Research Institute of the State of São Paulo and one of the scientists behind BAD, have gotten accustomed to pushing back on people who arrived preaching “improvement” through trees—first from nonprofits, mostly of the trillion-trees variety, but now from the timber industry. “They are using the carbon discourse as one more argument to say that business is great,” Durigan told me. “They are happy to be seen as the good guys.” 

Durigan saw tragedy in the way that Cerrado had been transformed into cattle pasture in just a generation, but there was also opportunity in restoring it once the cattle left. Bringing the Cerrado back would be hard work—usually requiring fire and hacking away at invasive grasses. But even simply leaving it alone could allow the ecosystem to begin to repair itself and offer something like the old savanna habitat. Abandoned eucalyptus farms, by contrast, were nightmares to return to native vegetation; the strange Cerrado plants refused to take root in the highly modified soil. 

In recent years, Durigan had visited hundreds of eucalyptus farms in the area, shadowing her students who had been hired by timber companies to help establish promised corridors of native vegetation in accordance with federal rules. “They’re planting entire watersheds,” she said. “The rivers are dying.” 

Durigan saw plants in isolated patches growing taller than they normally would, largely thanks to the suppression of regular brush fires. They were throwing shade on the herbs and grasses and drawing more water. The result was an environment gradually choking on itself, at risk of collapse during drought and retaining only a fraction of the Cerrado’s original diversity. If this was what people meant by bringing back the Cerrado, she believed it was only hastening its ultimate disappearance. 

In a recent survey of the watershed around the Parque do Pombo, which is hemmed in on each side by eucalyptus, two other researchers reported finding “devastation” and turned to Plato’s description of Attica’s forests, cleared to build the city of Athens: “What remains now compared to what existed is like the skeleton of a sick man … All the rich and soft soil has dissolved, leaving the country of skin and bones.” 

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After a long day of touring the land—and spinning out on the clay—we found that our fuel was low. The Parque do Pombo groundskeeper looked over at his rusting fuel tank and apologized. It had been spoiled by the last rain. At least, he said, it was all downhill to the highway. 

The road of opportunity

We only made it about halfway down the eucalyptus-lined road. After the car huffed and left us stranded, Borzone and I started walking toward the highway, anticipating a long night. We remembered locals’ talk of jaguars recently pushed into the area by development. 

But after only 30 minutes or so, a set of lights came into view across the plain. Then another, and another. Then the outline of a tractor, a small tanker truck, and, somewhat curiously, a tour bus. The gear and the vehicles bore the logo of Suzano, the world’s largest pulp and paper company.

After talking to a worker, we boarded the empty tour bus and were taken to a cluster of spotlit tents, where women prepared eucalyptus seedlings, stacking crates of them on white fold-out tables. A night shift like this one was unusual. But they were working around the clock—aiming to plant a million trees per day across Suzano’s farms, in preparation for opening the world’s largest pulp factory just down the highway. It would open in a few weeks with a capacity of 2.55 million metric tons of pulp per year. 

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The tour bus was standing by to take the workers down the highway at 1 a.m., arriving in the nearest city, Três Lagoas, by 3 a.m. to pick up the next shift. “You don’t do this work without a few birds at home to feed,” a driver remarked as he watched his colleagues filling holes in the field by the light of their headlamps. After getting permission from his boss, he drove us an hour each way to town to the nearest gas station.

This highway through the Cellulose Valley has become known as a road of opportunity, with eucalyptus as the region’s new lifeblood after the cattle industry shrank its footprint. Not far from the new Suzano factory, a popular roadside attraction is an oversize sculpture of a black bull at the gates of a well-known ranch. The ranch was recently planted, and the bull is now guarded by a phalanx of eucalyptus. 

On TikTok, workers post selfies and views from tractors in the nearby groves, backed by a song from the local country music duo Jads e Jadson. “I’m going to plant some eucalyptus / I’ll get rich and you’ll fall in love with me,” sings a down-on-his-luck man at risk of losing his fiancée. Later, when he cuts down the trees and becomes a wealthy man with better options, he cuts off his betrothed, too. 

The race to plant more eucalyptus here is backed heavily by the state government, which last year waived environmental requirements for new farms on pasture and hopes to quickly double its area in just a few years. The trees were an important component of Brazil’s plan to meet its global climate commitments, and the timber industry was keen to cash in. Companies like Suzano have already proposed that tens of thousands of their hectares become eligible for carbon credits. 

What’s top of mind for everyone, though, is worsening fires. Even when we visited in midwinter, the weather was hot and dry. The wider region was in a deep drought, perhaps the worst in 700 years, and in a few weeks, one of the worst fire seasons ever would begin. Suzano would be forced to make a rare pause in its planting when soil temperatures reached 154 °F. 

Posted along the highway are constant reminders of the coming danger: signs, emblazoned with the logos of a dozen timber companies, that read “FOGO ZERO,” or “ZERO FIRE.” 

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In other places struck by megafires, like Portugal and Chile, eucalyptus has been blamed for worsening the flames. (The Chilean government has recently excluded pine and eucalyptus farms from its climate plans.) But here in Brazil, where climate change is already supersizing the blazes, the industry offers sophisticated systems to detect and suppress fires, argued Calmon of Conservation International. “You really need to protect it because that’s your asset,” he said. (BTG also noted that in parts of the Cerrado where human activity has increased, fires have decreased.) 

Eucalyptus is often portrayed as impossibly thirsty compared with other trees, but Calmon pointed out it is not uniquely so. In some parts of the Cerrado, it has been found to consume four times as much water as native vegetation; in others, the two landscapes have been roughly in line. It depends on many factors—what type of soil it’s planted in, what Cerrado vegetation coexists with it, how intensely the eucalyptus is farmed. Timber companies, which have no interest in seeing their own plantations run dry, invest heavily in managing water. Another hope, Wishnie told me, is that by vastly increasing the forest canopy, the new eucalyptus will actually gather moisture and help produce rain. 

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That’s a common narrative and one that’s been taught in schools here in Três Lagoas for decades, Borzone explained when we met up the day after our rescue with Marine Dubos-Raoul, a local geographer and university professor, and two of her students. Dubos-Raoul laughed uneasily. If this idea about rain was in fact true, they hadn’t seen it here. They crouched around the table at the cafe, speaking in a hush; their opinions weren’t particularly popular in this lumber town.

Dubos-Raoul had long tracked the impacts of the waves of planting on longtime rural residents, who complained that industry had taken their water or sprayed their gardens with pesticides. 

The evidence tying the trees to water problems in the region, Dubos-Raoul admitted, is more anecdotal than data driven. But she heard it in conversation after conversation. “People would have tears in their eyes,” she said. “It was very clear to them that it was connected to the arrival of the eucalyptus.” (Since our meeting, a study, carried out in response to demands from local residents, has blamed the planting for 350 depleted springs in the area, sparking a rare state inquiry into the issue.) In any case, Dubos-Raoul thought, it didn’t make much sense to keep adding matches to the tinderbox.

Shortly after talking with Dubos-Raoul, we ventured to the town of Ribas do Rio Pardo to meet Charlin Castro at his family’s river resort. Suzano’s new pulp factory stood on the horizon, surrounded by one of the densest areas of planting in the region. 

PABLO ALBARENGA

PABLO ALBARENGA

With thousands of workers arriving, mostly temporarily, to build the factory and plant the fields, the sleepy farming village had turned into a boomtown, and developed something of a lawless reputation—prostitution, homelessness, collisions between logging trucks and drunk drivers—and Castro was chronicling much of it for a hyperlocal Instagram news outlet, while also running for city council. 

But overall, he was thankful to Suzano. The factory was transforming the town into a “a real place,” as he put it, even if change was at times painful. 

His father, Camilo, gestured with a sinewy arm over to the water, where he recalled boat races involving canoes with crews of a dozen. That was 30 years ago. It was impossible to imagine now as I watched a family cool off in this bend in the river, the water just knee deep. But it’s hard to say what exactly is causing the low water levels. Perhaps it’s silt from the ranches, Charlin suggested. Or a change in the climate. Or, maybe, it could be the trees. 

Upstream, Ana Cláudia (who goes by “Tica”) and Antonio Gilberto Lima were more certain what was to blame. The couple, who are in their mid-60s, live in a simple brick house surrounded by fruit trees. They moved there a decade ago, seeking a calm retirement—one of a hundred or so families taking part in land reforms that returned land to smallholders. But recently, life has been harder. To preserve their well, they had let their vegetable garden go to seed. Streams were dry, and the old pools in the pastures where they used to fish were gone, replaced by trees; tapirs were rummaging through their garden, pushed, they believed, by lack of habitat. 

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They were surrounded by eucalyptus, planted in waves with the arrival of each new factory. No one was listening, they told me, as the cattle herd bellowed outside the door. “The trees are sad,” Gilberto said, looking out over his few dozen pale-humped animals grazing around scattered Cerrado species left in the paddock. Tica told me she knew that paper and pulp had to come from somewhere, and that many people locally were benefiting. But the downsides were getting overlooked, she thought. They had signed a petition to the government, organized by Dubos-Raoul, seeking to rein in the industry. Perhaps, she hoped, it could reach American investors, too. 

The green halo 

A few weeks before my trip, BTG had decided it was ready to show off Project Alpha. The visit was set for my last day in Brazil; the farm formerly known as Fazenda Engano was further upriver in Camapuã, a town that borders Ribas do Rio Pardo. It was a long, circuitous drive north to get out there, but it wouldn’t be that way much longer; a new highway was being paved that would directly connect the two towns, part of an initiative between the timber industry and government to expand the cellulose hub northward. A local official told me he expected tens of thousands of hectares of eucalyptus in the next few years.

For now, though, it was still the frontier. The intention was to plant “well outside the forest sector,” Wishnie told me—not directly in the shadow of a mill, but close enough for the operation to be practical, with access to labor and logistics. That distance was important evidence that the trees would store more carbon than what’s accounted for in a business-as-usual scenario. The other guarantee was the restoration. It wasn’t good business to buy land and not plant every acre you could with timber. It was made possible only with green investments from Apple and others.

That morning, Wishnie had emailed me a press release announcing that Microsoft had joined Apple in seeking help from BTG to help meet its carbon demands. The technology giant had made the largest-ever purchase of carbon credits, representing 8 million tons of CO₂, from Project Alpha, following smaller commitments from TSMC and Murata, two of Apple’s suppliers. 

I was set to meet Carlos Guerreiro, head of Latin American operations for BTG’s timber subsidiary, at a gas station in town, where we would set off together for the 24,000-hectare property. A forester in Brazil for much of his life, he had flown in from his home near São Paulo early that morning; he planned to check out the progress of the planting at Project Alpha and then swing down to the bank’s properties across the Cellulose Valley, where BTG was finalizing a $376 million deal to sell land to Suzano. 

COURTESY OF BTG

Guerreiro defended BTG’s existing holdings as sustainable engines of development in the region. But all the same, Project Alpha felt like a new beginning for the company, he told me. About a quarter of this property had been left untouched when the pasture was first cleared in the 1980s, but the plan now was to restore an additional 13% of the property to native Cerrado plants, bringing the total to 37%. (BTG says it will protect more land on future farms to arrive at its 50-50 target.) Individual patches of existing native vegetation would be merged with others around the property, creating a 400-meter corridor that largely followed the streams and rivers—beyond the 60 meters required by law. 

The restoration work was happening with the help of researchers from a Brazilian university, though they were still testing the best methods. We stood over trenches that had been planted with native seeds just weeks before, shoots only starting to poke out of the dirt. Letting the land regenerate on its own was often preferable, Guerreiro told me, but the best approach would depend on the specifics of each location. In other places, assistance with planting or tending or clearing back the invasive grasses could be better. 

The approach of largely letting things be was already yielding results, he noted: In parts of the property that hadn’t been grazed in years, they could already see the hardscrabble Cerrado clawing back with a vengeance. They’d been marveling at the fauna, caught on camera traps: tapirs, anteaters, all kinds of birds. They had even spotted a jaguar. The project would ensure that this growth would continue for decades. The land wouldn’t be sold to another rancher and go back to looking like other parts of the property, which were regularly cleared of native habitat. The hope, he said, was that over time the regenerating ecosystems would store more carbon, and generate more credits, than the eucalyptus. (The company intends to submit its carbon plans to Verra later this year.)

We stopped for lunch at the dividing line between the preserve and the eucalyptus, eating ham sandwiches in the shade of the oldest trees on the property, already two stories tall and still, by Guerreiro’s estimate, putting on a centimeter per day. He was planting at a rate of 40,000 seedlings per day in neat trenches filled with white lime to make the sandy Cerrado soil more inviting. In seven years or so, half of the trees will be thinned and pulped. The rest will keep growing. They’ll stand for seven years longer and grow thick and firm enough for plywood. The process will then start anew. Guerreiro described a model where clusters of farms mixed with preserves like this one will be planted around mills throughout the Cerrado. But nothing firm had been decided.

PABLO ALBARENGA

This experiment, Wishnie told me later, could have a big payoff. The important thing, he reminded me, was that stretches of the Cerrado would be protected at a scale no one had achieved before—something that wouldn’t happen without eucalyptus. He strongly disagreed with the scientists who said eucalyptus didn’t fit here. The government had analyzed the watershed, he explained, and he was confident the land could support the trees. At the end of the day, the choice was between doing something and doing nothing. “We talk about restoration as if it’s a thing that happens,” he said. 

When I asked Pilon to take a look at satellite imagery and photos of the property, she was unimpressed. It looked to her like yet another misguided attempt at planting trees in an area that had once naturally been a dense savanna. (Her assessment is supported by a land survey from the 1980s that classified this land as a typical Cerrado ecosystem—some trees, but mostly shrubbery. BTG responded that the survey was incorrect and the satellite images clearly showed a closed-canopy forest.) 

As Lucy Rowland, an expert on the region at the University of Exeter and another BAD signatory, put it: “Under no circumstances should planting eucalyptus ever be considered a viable project to receive carbon credits in the Cerrado.” 

Over months of reporting, the way that both sides spoke in absolutes about how to save this vanishing ecosystem had become familiar. Chazdon, the Australia-based forest researcher, told me she too felt that the tenor of the argument over how and where to grow has become more vehement as demand for tree-based carbon removal has intensified. “Nobody’s a villain,” she said. “There are disconnects on both sides.”

Chazdon had been excited to hear about BTG’s project. It was, she thought, the type of thing that was sorely needed in conservation—mixing profitable enterprises with an approach to restoration that considers the wider landscape. “I can understand why the Cerrado ecologists are up in arms,” she said. “They get the feeling that nobody cares about their ecosystems.” But demands for ecological purity could indeed get in the way of doing much of anything—especially in places like the Cerrado, where laws and financing favor destruction over restoration. 

Still, thinking about the scale of the carbon removal problem, she considered it sensible to wonder about the future that was being hatched. While there is, in fact, a limit to how much additional land the world needs for pulp and plywood products in the near future, there is virtually no limit to how much land it could devote to sequestering carbon. Which means we need to ask hard questions about the best way to use it. 

PABLO ALBARENGA

It was true, Chazdon said, that planting eucalyptus in the Cerrado was an act of destruction—it’d make that land nearly impossible to recover. The areas preserved in between them would also likely struggle to fully renew itself, without fire or clearing. She would feel more comfortable with such large-scale projects if the bar for restoration were much higher—say, 75% or more. But that almost certainly wouldn’t satisfy her grassland colleagues who don’t want any eucalyptus at all. And it might not fit the profit model—the flywheel that Apple and others are seeking in order to scale up carbon removal fast. 

Barbara Haya, who studies carbon offsets at the University of California, Berkeley, encouraged me to think about all of it differently. The improvements to planting eucalyptus here, at this farm, could be a perfectly good thing for this industry, she said. Perhaps they merit some claim about greener toilet paper or plywood. Haya would leave that debate to the ecologists.

But we weren’t talking about toilet paper or plywood. We were talking about laptops and smart watches and ChatGPT. And the path to connecting those things to these trees was more convoluted. The carbon had to be disentangled first from the wood’s other profitable uses and then from the wider changes that were happening in this region and its industries. There seemed to be many plausible scenarios for where this land was heading. Was eucalyptus the only feasible route for carbon to find its way here? 

Haya is among the experts who argue that the idea of precisely canceling out corporate emissions to reach carbon neutrality is a broken one. That’s not to say protecting nature can’t help fight climate change. Conserving existing forests and grasslands, for example, could often yield greater carbon and biodiversity benefits in the long run than planting new forests. But the carbon math used to justify those efforts was often fuzzier. This makes every claim of carbon neutrality fragile and drives companies toward projects that are easier to prove, she thinks, but perhaps have less impact. 

One idea is that companies should instead shift to a “contribution” model that tracks how much money they put toward climate mitigation, without worrying about the exact amount of carbon removed. “Let’s say the goal is to save the Cerrado,” Haya said. “Could they put that same amount of money and really make a difference?” Such an approach, she pointed out, could help finance the preservation of those last intact Cerrado remnants. Or it could fund restoration, even if the restored vegetation takes years to grow or sometimes needs to burn. 

The approach raises its own questions—about how to measure the impact of those investments and what kinds of incentives would motivate corporations to act. But it’s a vision that has gained more popularity as scrutiny of carbon credits grows and the options available to companies narrow. With the current state of the world, “what private companies do matters more than ever,” Haya told me. “We need them not to waste money.” 

In the meantime, it’s up to the consumer reading the label to decide what sort of path we’re on. 

PABLO ALBARENGA

Before we left the farm, Borzone and I had one more task: to plant a tree. The sun was getting low over Project Alpha when I was handed an iron contraption that cradled a eucalyptus seedling, pulled from a tractor piled with plants. 

“There’s nothing wrong with the trees,” Borzone had said earlier, squinting up at the row of 18-month-old eucalyptus, their fluttering leaves flashing in the hot wind as if in an ill-practiced burlesque show. “I have to remind myself of that.” But still it felt strange putting one in the ground. We were asking so much of it, after all. And we were poised to ask more.

I squeezed the handle, pulling the iron hinge taut and forcing the plant deep into the soil. It poked out at a slight angle that I was sure someone else would need to fix later, or else this eucalyptus tree would grow askew. I was slow and clumsy in my work, and by the time I finished, the tractor was far ahead of us, impossibly small on the horizon. The worker grabbed the tool from my hand and headed toward it, pushing seedlings down as he went, hurried but precise, one tree after another.

Gregory Barber is a journalist based in San Francisco. 

This story was produced in partnership with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, as well as support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.