Protecting the Caatinga in Brazil

Brazil’s Caatinga is home to a diverse array of plants and wildlife, and millions of people. We help protect it.

SC Johnson has played a significant role in environmental protection in Brazil for more than eight decades, with a special focus on the Caatinga biome, home to a diverse array of plants and wildlife.

The only exclusively Brazilian forest, the Caatinga’s name means “white forest.”

It reflects the fact that during the dry season, most plants lose their leaves, leaving only the whitish tree trunks across the landscape.

With its semi-arid climate, the broad Caatinga biome hosts a wide array of life, including over 5,000 types of plants, 148 mammals, 510 bird species, 116 reptile species, 49 amphibian species and 240 types of fish.

In 1998, SC Johnson helped establish Associação Caatinga with the creation of the Caatinga Conservation Fund to study and protect the region. The gift was a tribute to H.F. Johnson, Jr., whose 1935 expedition to Fortaleza, Brazil helped establish the company’s long relationship with the people and environment of Brazil.

Our company’s initial funding helped preserve and catalog more than 2,240 plants and animal species. SC Johnson also donated 18,000 acres of Caatinga land to The Nature Conservancy, and contributed to the protection of two Caatinga regions.

Now, over 20 years into our partnership with Associação Caatinga, our support continues with a focus on developing socio-economic projects for the conservation of the biome and the sustainable development of rural communities.

Impacts of the partnership include:

• Four springs sheltered, which helps avoid 4.8 billion liters of water runoff per year and 1,647,245 tons of CO2 emissions.

•  45 species of mammals, 323 plant species, 45 reptiles, 230 birds and 33 amphibians preserved in the Serra das Almas Nature Reserve.

• Monitoring technologies installed in the homes of families living close to the reserve, facilitating access to quality drinking water and food security.

• Environment education for families provided through a series of booklets, manuals, books and magazines on themes related to the Caatinga

• 4,000 food baskets donated to families in the States of Ceará and Piauí as part of the Caatigueiros United Against Hunger campaign in 2021, with more to come.

With SC Johnson’s help, the association has sought to integrate conservation with sustainable development in communities surrounding the Serra das Almas Nature Reserve, a conservation unit managed by Associação Caatinga.

Partnerships like this help SC Johnson continue working to protect forests and stop deforestation, while assisting the communities that inhabit them.