Paraná’s Jardin de Mel
One of the Top 20 Most Influential Projects of 2024
For preserving local biodiversity through the reintroduction of native pollinators
Region: Latin America Sector: Urban Development UN SDGs: 11, Sustainable Cities and Communities; 13, Climate Action; 15, Life on Land
The Amazon Rainforest is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, and its health is essential to the global well-being of humans, animals and plants alike. Less talked about, however, are Brazil’s other ecosystems, including the Atlantic Forest, the primary biome in the state of Paraná. While not as well-known as the Amazon, the Atlantic Forest is classified by the WWF as one of the 200 eco-regions of global importance. More than 50 percent of its plant species are endemic; many are in danger of extinction.
Enter bees, which are responsible for pollinating approximately 90 percent of the plant species in the Atlantic Forest. Without them, or with a severely diminished bee population, the Atlantic Forest will face even greater threats than those it confronts now. And bees themselves are experiencing unprecedented challenges to their populations: among the 300 native stingless bee species found in Brazil, approximately 100 are at risk of extinction because of deforestation, pollution, and climate change.
The state government of Paraná chose to take decisive action to address both challenges by launching a project called “Jardins de Mel,” or “honey gardens.” It all began with a group of third graders and inspiration from the Brazilian city of Curitiba, which is respected internationally for its pioneering environmental initiatives.
In 2019, third graders wrote a letter to the state’s Secretariat for Sustainable Development (SEDEST) to share their class project about honeybees. The students knew the bees were in trouble, and they closed the letter with a call to action: What was SEDEST going to do about it? It would have been easy enough to dismiss the letter, but SEDEST officials knew that solutions were available. They could replicate the success of another project in Curitiba, a neighboring city to the east, which had introduced honey gardens several years earlier to protect its local ecosystems.
The most successful project managers know that a project template can be useful, but it will always need to be adapted to local contexts, realities, and resources. It also needs to factor in human variables: the partners who can help move the project from idea to execution, the stakeholders who can be involved and those who will be affected, and, of course, how the project can be funded.
Fortunately, SEDEST realized all of this. It began by consulting with Curitiba to learn about best practices for implementing its own honey garden program. It aligned the project with United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and pursued legislation that would both justify the project and hold project managers accountable, enshrining the honey gardens as a component of the Paraná Mais Verde Program (or Greener Paraná Program), decreed by state law. It also brought on partners, including the Water and Land Institute.
The state’s specific milestones for the project included installing beehives in city parks; training citizens to be “guardians” of native stingless bees to maintain the culture of breeding bees; bringing the project to schools, both through curricula and through hive installation; and promoting awareness of bees and their importance through public education initiatives.
The gears of government don’t always turn quickly, and it took several years for the honey gardens project to be implemented in Paraná. But in 2023, the project launched in earnest. By October of that year, the state had invested over $54,000 USD to achieve the installation of more than 200 hive structures. Many of the hives are installed in public places, such as parks and Iguaçu Palace — the home of the state’s government — as a means of making the bees and their importance visible to residents. The hives house six bee species that are all stingless, and all native to Paraná: Guaraipo (at risk of extinction), Jataí, Mandaçaia, Manduri, Mirim, and Tubuna. “It is a project that draws the attention of the population to the need to care for the environment, and we want to expand it even further,” says Valdemar Bernardo Jorge, Secretary of State for Sustainable Development.