According to many, climate change poses the greatest threat to our planet. People across the globe have fought back against it in many ways. But one real estate project in Brazil may hold the key to achieving sustainability on earth while also turning the country into a green superpower.

Cidade Matarazzo

The French investor Alexandre Allard is building a vertical forest and green communal living space in the heart of Sao Paulo, Brazil, which he’s calling Cidade Matarazzo.

It will spread across more than 30,000 square meters and be located next to one of the city’s main transportation hubs. The land had previously been abandoned, and Mr. Allard acquired it in 2008 with the goal of creating the largest green-living community in the world.

When Mr. Allard is finished with the development, the neighborhood will be filled with vertical forests, lush parks, and other natural landmarks designed to serve as a model of what’s possible with a real estate development mindset geared towards sustainability.

How Vertical Forests Help the Planet

The idea of a vertical forest was first achieved by Bosco Verticale – a team of architects based out of Italy. The concept is to take a standard highrise apartment building and transform it with large amounts of sustainable plant life and vegetation integrated on the roof of the building and throughout its many terraces.

This helps the planet and those who live on it in a few different ways.

First, the plants and vegetation on a highrise with a vertical forest help to absorb dust from the air, which is omnipresent in cities and bad for people’s health. Second, these plants help to absorb much of the CO2 emissions that humans create while living their daily lives.

The net result is that people who live in these highrise vertical forests end up offsetting a good portion of the harm that they cause to the planet’s atmosphere. A single vertical forest won’t solve climate change. But if this becomes the standard apartment building design moving forward, it’ll be a massive step in the right direction.

How This Might Change Brazil

Mr. Allard’s project is ambitious, with an investment budget of nearly 3.5 billion reais. He hopes that this development will change Brazil for the better in a few ways.

For starters, Brazil has long been defined by the raw resources that it exports to other countries. This might be the first step in allowing more of the country’s citizens to benefit from the many wonderful natural resources that Brazil possesses.

Mr. Allard argues that Brazil is well-positioned to become a green superpower given its abundant natural resources in the Amazon and outside of it. The question becomes how Brazil uses those resources moving forward.

Cidade Matarazzo is a prime example of how Brazil can take what it possesses naturally and use it to benefit its own citizenry instead of depleting those natural resources and shipping them abroad.

The future is impossible to predict. But Alexandre Allard’s big real estate investment is a major step in the right direction towards Brazil fulfilling its destiny of becoming a green superpower.