Bringing tropical rainforests back to life.
Restoring the most degraded regions of the Amazon — fast enough to protect the biome as a whole.
The Challenge
Across large parts of the Amazon’s arc of deforestation, rainforest ecosystems have been pushed beyond the conditions in which they can easily recover.
These regions account for a disproportionate share of the forest loss that has occurred across the whole Amazon, yet they remain among the most difficult places to restore.
In these highly degraded landscapes, the loss of tree cover leads to intense sunlight, rapid soil degradation, and chronic water stress during the dry season. Under such conditions, tree seedlings struggle to survive, and conventional reforestation efforts often fail or progress extremely slowly.
Recovery in these regions can take decades — time the Amazon biome does not have. As degraded areas expand, they contribute to local drying, reduced rainfall, and the destabilisation of the wider rainforest system.
Addressing this challenge requires restoring not just trees, but the protective ecological functions that intact forests provide.
Our Solution
The Guardian Structures
The Guardians are semi-organic, temporary structures designed for regions where conventional reforestation approaches have struggled to succeed.
Standing approximately ten metres high, they act as mother trees — recreating the protective conditions of a rainforest canopy in landscapes where it has been lost.
By providing dappled shade, protecting fragile soils, and capturing and retaining water through the dry season, the Guardians address the primary causes of tree mortality in the most degraded regions of the Amazon.
This enables native vegetation to establish and recover far more rapidly, allowing forest ecosystems to re-form in years rather than decades.
There is nothing else in the world that enables the most severely degraded, open-canopy rainforest landscapes — with depleted soils and savannising conditions — to recover this quickly while protecting soils, biodiversity, and water.
Phase One
Phase One establishes a pilot restoration site in Maranhão, within the Amazon’s arc of deforestation — one of the most degraded and ecologically fragile regions of the biome.
Five Guardian structures will be deployed across one hectare of severely degraded land, integrating reforestation, direct seeding, assisted natural regeneration, and agroforestry within a single coordinated system.
Over an initial three-year implementation period, the site will demonstrate how accelerated recovery — targeting forest regeneration within a decade rather than multiple decades — can be achieved in these conditions.
This hectare will serve as a blueprint for restoring the most difficult rainforest landscapes at scale.
The Guardians Project is currently seeking funding and aligned partners to deliver Phase One.