Quilombola communities and Cerrado preservation: the knowledge restoration needs

The Cerrado is Brazil's second-largest biome and one of the most threatened on the planet. Over 50% of its original cover has been converted to pasture and monoculture. But there's an overlap that most analyses miss: the best-preserved areas of the Cerrado coincide, with striking regularity, with quilombola territories.

That's not coincidence. It's the result of centuries of land management. Quilombola communities — descendants of Afro-Brazilian resistance settlements — have occupied the Cerrado for generations, in many cases for over 200 years. They developed land-use practices that keep native vegetation functional: fruit harvesting without felling trees, slash-and-rest cultivation with fallow cycles, and sustainable extraction of species like pequi, baru, mangaba, and buriti without compromising natural regeneration.

Kalunga: Brazil's largest quilombola community, inside the Cerrado

The Kalunga territory, in northeastern Goiás state, spans over 260,000 hectares and is home to roughly 8,000 people. It is Brazil's largest quilombola community — and one of the best-preserved areas of the Cerrado in Goiás. While soy farms advance around it and rivers dry up, inside the Kalunga territory the native vegetation holds. The springs flow. Biodiversity persists.

Samaúma operates in the Kalunga territory with a model built on a straightforward premise: the people who live there know more about that ecosystem than any outside technician. Damião, for instance, has lived in the territory for decades. He knows every native species, understands where each seed germinates, reads the flowering and fruiting cycles with a precision that academic counterparts would take years to develop. In Samaúma's operation, he is not a "beneficiary." He is a technical reference.

Quilombola communities don't need to be taught how to preserve the Cerrado. They've been doing it for centuries. What they need is formal recognition, decent employment, and policies that respect their role.

Formal employment in traditional territory

One of the chronic problems facing rural quilombola communities is the lack of formal employment. Young people migrate to cities, traditional knowledge erodes, and territories become vulnerable to land-grabbing pressure. Samaúma hires directly within these communities — with CLT contracts, salaries, and full labor rights. Of the organization's 230+ formal employees, over 50% are Indigenous or quilombola.

This changes local dynamics in concrete ways. When a 22-year-old quilombola man has a formal restoration job in his own territory, he doesn't need to leave. When a quilombola woman is hired as a seed collector with a signed work card, the knowledge she carries — passed down from her grandmother — becomes a professional asset, not an anthropological curiosity.

• 260,000 hectares — the extent of the Kalunga territory in northeastern Goiás

• ~8,000 people live in Brazil's largest quilombola community

• 50%+ of Samaúma's team is Indigenous or quilombola, all under CLT contracts

• 72% terrestrial survival rate — with species selected by local experts

Restoration without community is planting without roots

Brazil's ecological restoration sector has grown in recent years, driven by climate targets and regulatory pressure. But much of the industry still treats territory as empty space to be filled with seedlings — ignoring that people live there, that knowledge exists there, that there is history.

The outcome is predictable. Projects that plant without considering local context face high mortality rates, land conflicts, and mediocre ecological results. The seedling may survive, but the forest doesn't form. Because a forest is not a collection of trees — it's a system. And systems need people who understand them from the inside.

Samaúma's experience in the Kalunga territory demonstrates what happens when the equation is inverted. When the community is the starting point — not the social appendix of the project — restoration works. The right species are planted in the right places, in the right cycles. Survival rates rise. The ecosystem responds.

The Cerrado needs restoration at scale. But scale without local knowledge is waste. Quilombola communities are not a complement to restoration. They are its precondition.