by David Finlay (27 Nov 08)

Over the last ten years, Peugeot has sponsored a fascinating reforestation project at the Fazenda São Nicolau in the Mato Grosso estate in Amazonia.

The project is being managed by the French National Forestry Board (Office National des Forêts, or ONF) and is scheduled to continue for another three decades. Two million trees of 50 species native to Brazil have been planted, largely with a view to creating a "carbon" sink in which carbon is captured by the growing trees rather than floating off into the atmosphere and causing who knows what kind of havoc when it gets there.

Establishing the exact numerical success of a project like this is not easy, but it is believed that so far 53,000 tonnes of CO2 have been captured, while 2000 tonnes have been released. The net figure is therefore 51,000 tonnes, and to get a rough idea of what that means in motoring terms, imagine driving a small car - one of Peugeot's more economical models, for example - in such a way that it emits 120g/km of CO2.

You would have to drive it like this for more than 265 million miles (or most of the distance travelled by the Earth round the sun each year) in order to pump out 51,000 tonnes; or, to put it another way, this is the equivalent of capturing the CO2 emitted by more than two and a half thousand cars with a life cycle of 100,000 miles each.

By the time the project finishes in 2038, the total CO2 saving is expected to be in the region of 700,000 tonnes, in which case we're talking about the equivalent 35,000 or so 120g/km cars running for 100,000 miles. Given how many cars there are on the road in the world, and the fact that such a large number emit more than 120g/km, the Fazenda São Nicolau is never going to reverse the automotive CO2 trend all by itself, but it's doing a pretty good job considering that it so far extends over 1800 hectares.

And there is more to the project than the carbon sink aspect. Since 2001, 2300 students have visited the Fazenda as part of an environmental education programme, and a further 120 from ten different institutions have gone there for individual or collective research work. On top of that, 10 tonnes of Brazil nuts have been harvested from the site in 2008 alone for the benefit of local farming communities, and there is a permanent staff of 12 people, all of whom are themselves Brazilian.

As Peugeot says, the project is "designed to evolve", and although much interesting work has already been done - not least in creating the site in the first place - the Faenza is in a position to help scientists answer existing questions and perhaps ask new ones, not only about the trees themselves but on how they affect and are affected by other forms of life such as parasites, other plants and the animals in the area.

Furthermore, the site is described by Peugeot as "truly a pilot project designed to serve as a model". If it achieves that aim, and encourages other organisations to create similar projects, it could well be the starting-point for an important increase in our understanding of the way the natural world works.

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