On a sultry afternoon in Tomé-Açu, the agricultural heart of northern Brazil, farmer Zé Maria Pantoja strolls beneath the canopy of his 50 hectares of forested land. Tall açaí palms and hulking Brazil nut trees tower overhead, while cacao and cupuaçu bushes crowd the leaf-strewn ground below; the air thick with the scent of tropical growth and alive with bird chatter.

Three decades ago, this plot in the Amazon Basin state of Pará was a failing pepper monoculture owned by Zé Maria’s father. When Zé Maria proposed replanting it as a diverse forest of crops, his father balked. “Pepper had to be pepper, cacao was cacao… It would never work to plant them together,” Zé Maria recalls.

Today, that once-barren land is a technicolour abundance of cacao pods, açaí berries, Brazil nuts, passion fruit and cassava. Instead of a single annual pepper harvest, Zé Maria brings in different crops year-round – a shift he says has doubled production and income, reshaping his family’s prospects. Even his father has come around: “Today everything is fine. He agrees with it, and I know he is happy about it,” Zé Maria says.

Zé Maria has built what is known as an “agroforestry” system – integrating diverse trees and crops on the same land. It is approach rooted in Indigenous farming knowledge and practised in different forms around the world for millennia.

By blurring the line between farm and forest, agroforestry can store carbon, rebuild soils and habitat, and diversify farm incomes – making it a compelling route to decarbonise agriculture without hollowing out rural communities.

In recent years, Zé Maria has partnered with Belterra, a Brazilian agroforestry enterprise set up in 2019. Belterra has provided technical support and seedlings to help farmers expand and connected them to markets – helping to prove that a family farm in the Amazon can be both profitable and ecologically sustainable. In 2023, Belterra was selected as an Earthshot Prize finalist for its approach.

Across the tropics, where deforestation and land degradation drive a large share of emissions, agroforestry is being touted as a rare climate solution that can also be a livelihood strategy – as long as it is built with the people who farm the land. According to Marcelo Ferronato, president of Brazilian environmental NGO Ecoporé, “agroforestry is the best option the world has to support climate, the environment and farmers all at once.”

The problem: A broken rural model

Brazil’s rural development has long been driven by clearing forest for cattle and commodity crops – a frontier model that rewarded extraction and land concentration. In the Amazon Basin, official policy encouraged settlers to convert “unproductive” forest into ranches and farms.

The result has been vast forest loss. Over the past half-century, more than 700,000 km² of Amazon rainforest has been deforested, with a further 6% heavily degraded. Scientists warn the Amazon may tip into irreversible die-back if it loses around 20% of its forest cover; estimates put losses already near 17%. Around 63% of Brazil’s roughly 160 million hectares of pasture, meanwhile, are degraded – an area roughly the size of Egypt left infertile and overrun with weeds.

The social dynamics are equally corrosive. Brazil has one of the most unequal land distributions on Earth: just 2.8% of landowners control over 56% of arable land, while the poorest 50% of small farms own only 2.5%. With weak land registries, opportunists can grab land by clear-cutting it; local leaders who resist have faced threats, violence and even murder.

Brazil is an extreme case, but not a unique one. Across the tropics, commodity monocultures and extensive cattle systems are major drivers of deforestation, while degraded farmland spreads as soils are mined and abandoned. Globally, agriculture – livestock and crops – has devoured roughly 50% of habitable land and left over one billion hectares of fields degraded.

Agroforestry – an ancient solution with modern science

Agroforestry – often categorised as ‘regenerative agriculture’ – mixes woody perennials with crops or livestock in designs intended to imitate natural ecosystems. By replacing monocultures with polycultures, agroforests can restore soil health, conserve water and support biodiversity – while keeping land in production.

Integrating trees into farms also turns fields into carbon sinks. The UN climate body estimates that, if scaled up to its potential globally, agroforestry could sequester 1.8–4.1 gigatonnes of CO₂ every year – roughly 4-10% of annual global emissions.

And agroforestry can also boost livelihoods. Trial sites in Zambia integrating Faidherbia albida trees yielded 88–190% more maize than sites without trees, while diversified harvests can spread risk and create multiple income streams.

Belterra’s model: Business meets regeneration

A former environmental official in Pará, Valmir Ortega left government in 2019 to set up Belterra. He established a private company, Belterra Agroflorestas, alongside a sister non-profit, the Belterra Institute. The company focuses on projects that can return revenue; the institute works with smaller subsistence farmers, including Indigenous and Quilombola communities, who are too small to make any discernible margins.

Belterra Agroflorestas works through two basic arrangements: smallholder partnerships and landowner leases. In smallholder partnerships, farmers contribute land and labour (and sometimes co-investment), while Belterra provides capital and knowhow – seedlings, inputs, training and market access – under a revenue-sharing agreement. Belterra’s agronomists help the farmer design a crop mix so the system can start paying back quickly (often with fast-growing staples such as cassava and banana) while longer-term crops like cacao, açaí and timber establish.

In the landowner leasing model, Belterra partners with owners of degraded pasture that has become unprofitable. Belterra rents the land, establishes an agroforest, and returns it after a defined period (often 10–20 years), earning revenue from the produce in the meantime.

Deep in the Amazon, forest protection cash must vie with glitter of illegal gold

But establishing agroforests isn’t cheap: Belterra estimates upfront investment of around US$10,000 per hectare over the first three years. To finance this, it uses blended capital – philanthropic and public funding to absorb early risk, and longer-term private finance to support scale.

Belterra says projects can become cash-positive after around three years once early yielding crops begin producing. It also models that a mature agroforest can generate roughly US$7,000–$20,000 per hectare a year in gross harvest revenue at year 10. By contrast, a small producer who raises cattle might earn only 1,000 to 2,000 reais (US$185-$371) per hectare per year, Ferronato notes.

The catch is time. Trees take years to bear, and agroforestry can face a long delay before the main returns arrive. Belterra tries to bridge that gap by frontloading support and intercropping fast-growing food crops early. “The farmer needs food and income in year one,” Ortega says.

Belterra also sells carbon credits as an additional revenue stream. Belterra estimates that each hectare will sequester 250–300 tonnes of carbon over a 25 to 30-year cycle – which it aggregates and certifies for sale, helping repay investors and reward farmers. Overall Belterra’s existing projects will sequester 500,000-600,000 tonnes of carbon.

Scaling with corporates: the supply chain shift

Belterra isn’t only working from the bottom up. Large companies are increasingly looking to integrate agroforestry into supply chains and climate strategies – bringing capital, procurement and, potentially, scale.

It has worked with agribusiness behemoth Cargill and Brazil’s cosmetics brand Natura on agroforestry approaches linked to supply-chain emissions, and with other buyers seeking ‘insetting’ – cutting emissions within their own sourcing rather than purchasing offsets from external projects.

But Belterra’s most high-profile tie-up is a 2023 agreement with US e-commerce giant Amazon, which committed 90 million reais (US$18m) to fund agroforestry in Pará. The initial three-year pilot aims to restore 3,000 hectares of degraded land by planting native trees alongside cash crops such as cacao, working with around 1,000 producers. Amazon says it expects to claim around 750,000 tonnes of carbon credits over 30 years, certified under Verra’s ABACUS standard.

“Agroforestry is right at the top of our list of scalable, catalytic climate solutions,” says Jamey Mulligan, Amazon’s head of carbon neutralisation science and strategy. “It’s a nascent space that needs nurturing, like the solar industry pre-2008.”

In the Acará municipality of Pará, that partnership shows up as the Carbon Sequestration Producers Association: 16 farming families managing their own agroforestry plots across a now-verdant mix of açaí, cacao, andiroba and more. The association aggregates dispersed agroforests so smallholders can access carbon finance collectively – without surrendering land, autonomy or crop choices. For Amazon it offers scale and traceability; for farmers it offers bargaining power and a bridge through the years before trees mature.

If the deals work, corporates can supply finance and reliable demand, while farmers get training, stable markets and a viable alternative to cattle or soy on degraded land. The risk, critics warn, is that agroforestry becomes a green fig leaf – which is why who controls the land and the terms of trade matters.

A just transition grown from the ground

There is vast potential in scaling up agroforestry across the world. In Brazil, for example, the size of the agroforestry market is predicted to roughly double to $9.7 billion by 2032.

Globally, there are currently around 1.2 billion people practicing some form of agroforestry on roughly 1 billion hectares of land – from shade-grown coffee in Asia to alley-cropping in Africa. “We did a survey and found agroforestry systems in 83 countries, comprising over 1,000 tree species and roughly 300 crops,” says Susan Cook-Patton, lead reforestation scientist for The Nature Conservancy (TNC). “There’s a lot of agroforestry out there and a lot of potential to expand.”

Agroforestry’s promise goes beyond crops and carbon. Done well, it can bridge decarbonisation, biodiversity and livelihoods – but it only becomes part of a just transition if it strengthens, rather than erodes, the rights and incomes of the people on the ground, experts say.

For Zé Maria, the approach has worked well. His abundant agroforest now earns enough to send his daughter to college and buy a small apartment in the city – opportunities his parents could hardly imagine.

His success has inspired neighbours to adopt similar methods, and he credits those who taught him. They say it’s a two-way process.

Emanuel Oliveira, agricultural consultant for Belterra – which has partnered with Zé Maria for three years now – smiles as he describes the farmer’s influence. “We’ve learned so much from him; he’s like a professor to me,” says Oliveira. “We pass on the lessons to other farmers, and we often bring them here to learn directly from him.”

This is an abridged version of original reporting by Oliver Gordon for JUST Stories – a global project from the Institute for Human Rights and Business dedicated to finding and telling stories of people working together to advance just transitions.

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A just agricultural transition takes root in Brazil