We were losing the light, and still about 20 kilometers from the main road, when the car shuddered and died at the edge of a strange forest.  The grove grew as if indifferent to certain unspoken rules of botany. There was no understory, no foreground or background, only the trees themselves, which grew as a wall of bare trunks that rose 100 feet or so before concluding with a burst of thick foliage near the top. The rows of trees ran perhaps the length of a New York City block and fell away abruptly on either side into untidy fields of dirt and grass. The vista recalled the husk of a failed condo development, its first apartments marooned when the builders ran out of cash. Standing there against the setting sun, the trees were, in their odd way, also rather stunning. I had no service out here—we had just left a remote nature preserve in southwestern Brazil—but I reached for my phone anyway, for a picture. The concern on the face of my travel partner, Clariana Vilela Borzone, a geographer and translator who grew up nearby, flicked to amusement. My camera roll was already full of eucalyptus. The trees sprouted from every hillside, along every road, and more always seemed to be coming. Across the dirt path where we were stopped, another pasture had been cleared for planting. The sparse bushes and trees that had once shaded cattle in the fields had been toppled and piled up, as if in a Pleistocene gravesite.  Borzone’s friends and neighbors were divided on the aesthetics of these groves. Some liked the order and eternal verdancy they brought to their slice of the Cerrado, a large botanical region that arcs diagonally across Brazil’s midsection. Its native savanna landscape was largely gnarled, low-slung, and, for much of the year, rather brown. And since most of that flora had been cleared decades ago for cattle pasture, it was browner and flatter still. Now that land was becoming trees. It was becoming beautiful.  Some locals say they like the order and eternal verdancy of the eucalyptus, which often stand in stark contrast to the Cerrado’s native savanna landscape.PABLO ALBARENGA Others considered this beauty a mirage. “Green deserts,” they called the groves, suggesting bounty from afar but holding only dirt and silence within. These were not actually forests teeming with animals and undergrowth, they charged, but at best tinder for a future megafire in a land parched, in part, by their vigorous growth. This was in fact a common complaint across Latin America: in Chile, the planted rows of eucalyptus were called the “green soldiers.” It was easy to imagine getting lost in the timber, a funhouse mirror of trunks as far as the eye could see. The timber companies that planted these trees push back on these criticisms as caricatures of a genus that’s demonized all over the world. They point to their sustainable forestry certifications and their handsome spending on fire suppression, and to the microphones they’ve placed that record cacophonies of birds and prove the groves are anything but barren. Whether people like the look of these trees or not, they are meeting a human need, filling an insatiable demand for paper and pulp products all over the world. Much of the material for the world’s toilet and tissue paper is grown in Brazil, and that, they argue, is a good thing: Grow fast and furious here, as responsibly as possible, to save many more trees elsewhere.  But I was in this region for a different reason: Apple. And also Microsoft and Meta and TSMC, and many smaller technology firms too. I was here because tech executives many thousands of miles away were racing toward, and in some cases stumbling, on their way to meet their climate promises—too little time, and too much demand for new devices and AI data centers. Not far from here, they had struck some of the largest-ever deals for carbon credits. They were asking something new of this tree: Could Latin America’s eucalyptus be a scalable climate solution?  On a practical level, the answer seemed straightforward. Nobody disputed how swiftly or reliably eucalyptus could grow in the tropics. This knowledge was the product of decades of scientific study and tabulations of biomass for wood or paper. Each tree was roughly 47% carbon, which meant that many tons of it could be stored within every planted hectare. This could be observed taking place in real time, in the trees by the road. Come back and look at these young trees tomorrow, and you’d see it: fresh millimeters of carbon, chains of cellulose set into lignin.  At the same time, Apple and the others were also investing in an industry, and a tree, with a long and controversial history in this part of Brazil and elsewhere. They were exerting their wealth and technological oversight to try to make timber operations more sustainable, more supportive of native flora, and less water intensive. Still, that was a hard sell to some here, where hundreds of thousands of hectares of pasture are already in line for planting; more trees were a bleak prospect in a land increasingly racked by drought and fire. Critics called the entire exercise an excuse to plant even more trees for profit.  Borzone and I did not plan to stay and watch the eucalyptus grow. Garden or forest or desert, ally or antagonist—it did not matter much with the emerging stars of the Southern Cross and our gas tank empty. We gathered our things from our car and set off down the dirt road through the trees. A big promise My journey into the Cerrado had begun months earlier, in the fall of 2023, when the actress Octavia Spencer appeared as Mother Nature in an ad alongside Apple CEO Tim Cook. In 2020, the company had set a goal to go “net zero” by the end of the decade, at which point all of its products—laptops, CPUs, phones, earbuds—would be produced without increasing the level of carbon in the atmosphere. “Who wants to disappoint me first?” Mother Nature asked with a sly smile. It was a third of the way to 2030—a date embraced by many corporations aiming to stay in line with the UN’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 °C over preindustrial levels—and where was the progress? Apple CEO Tim Cook stares down Octavia Spencer as “Mother Nature” in their ad spot touting the company’s claims for carbon neutrality.APPLE VIA YOUTUBE Cook was glad to inform her of the good news: The new Apple Watch was leading the way. A limited supply of the devices were already carbon neutral, thanks to things like recycled materials and parts that were specially sent by ship—not flown—from one factory to another. These special watches were labeled with a green leaf on Apple’s iconically soft, white boxes. Critics were quick to point out that declaring an individual product “carbon neutral” while the company was still polluting had the whiff of an early victory lap, achieved with some convenient accounting. But the work on the watch spoke to the company’s grand ambitions. Apple claimed that changes like procuring renewable power and using recycled materials had enabled it to cut emissions 75% since 2015. “We’re always prioritizing reductions; they’ve got to come first,” Chris Busch, Apple’s director of environmental initiatives, told me soon after the launch.  The company also acknowledged that it could not find reductions to balance all its emissions. But it was trying something new.  Since the 1990s, companies have purchased carbon credits based largely on avoiding emissions. Take some patch of forest that was destined for destruction and protect it; the stored carbon that wasn’t lost is turned into credits. But as the carbon market expanded, so did suspicion of carbon math—in some cases, because of fraud or bad science, but also because efforts to contain deforestation are often frustrated, with destruction avoided in one place simply happening someplace else. Corporations that once counted on carbon credits for “avoided” emissions can no longer trust them. (Many consumers feel they can’t either, with some even suing Apple over the ways it used past carbon projects to make its claims about the Apple Watch.) But that demand to cancel out carbon dioxide hasn’t gone anywhere—if anything, as AI-driven emissions knock some companies off track from reaching their carbon targets (and raise questions about the techniques used to claim emissions reductions), the need is growing. For Apple, even under the rosiest assumptions about how much it will continue to pollute, the gap is significant: In 2024, the company reported offsetting 700,000 metric tons of CO2, but the number it will need to hit in 2030 to meet its goals is 9.6 million.  So the new move is to invest in carbon “removal” rather than avoidance. The idea implies a more solid achievement: taking carbon molecules out of the atmosphere. There are many ways to attempt that, from trying to change the pH of the oceans so that they absorb more of the molecules to building machines that suck carbon straight out of the air. But these are long-term fixes. None of these technologies work at the scale and price that would help Apple and others meet their shorter-term targets. For that, trees have emerged again as the answer. This time the idea is to plant new ones instead of protecting old ones.  To expand those efforts in a way that would make a meaningful dent in emissions, Apple determined, it would also need to make carbon removal profitable. A big part of this effort would be driven by the Restore Fund, a $200 million partnership with Goldman Sachs and Conservation International, a US environmental nonprofit, to invest in “high quality” projects that promoted reforestation on degraded lands.   Profits would come from responsibly turning trees into products, Goldman’s head of sustainability explained when the fund was announced in 2021. But it was also an opportunity for Apple, and future investors, to “almost look at, touch, and feel their carbon,” he said—a concreteness that carbon credits had previously failed to offer. “The aim is to generate real, measurable carbon benefits, but to do that alongside financial returns,” Busch told me. It was intended as a flywheel of sorts: more investors, more planting, more carbon—an approach to climate action that looked to abundance rather than sacrifice. Apple markets its watch as a carbon-neutral product, based in part on the use of carbon credits. The announcement of the carbon-neutral Apple Watch was the occasion to promote the Restore Fund’s three initial investments, which included a native forestry project as well as eucalyptus farms in Paraguay and Brazil. The Brazilian timber plans were by far the largest in scale, and were managed by BTG Pactual, Latin America’s largest investment bank.  Busch connected me with Mark Wishnie, head of sustainability for Timberland Investment Group, BTG’s US-based subsidiary, which acquires and manages properties on behalf of institutional investors. After years in the eucalyptus business, Wishnie, who lives in Seattle, was used to strong feelings about the tree. It’s just that kind of plant—heralded as useful, even ornamental; demonized as a fire starter, water-intensive, a weed. “Has the idea that eucalyptus is invasive come up?” he asked pointedly. (It’s an “exotic” species in Brazil, yes, but the risk of invasiveness is low for the varieties most commonly planted for forestry.) He invited detractors to consider the alternative to the scale and efficiency of eucalyptus, which, he pointed out, relieves the pressure that humans put on beloved old-growth forests elsewhere.  Using eucalyptus for carbon removal also offered a new opportunity. Wishnie was overseeing a planned $1 billion initiative that was set to transform BTG’s timber portfolio; it aimed at a 50-50 split between timber and native restoration on old pastureland, with an emphasis on connecting habitats along rivers and streams. As a “high quality” project, it was meant to do better than business as usual. The conservation areas would exceed the legal requirements for native preservation in Brazil, which range from 20% to 35% in the Cerrado. In a part of Brazil that historically gets little conservation attention, it would potentially represent the largest effort yet to actually bring back the native landscape.  When BTG approached Conservation International with the 50% figure, the organization thought it was “too good to be true,” Miguel Calmon, the senior director of the nonprofit’s Brazilian programs, told me. With the restoration work paid for by the green financing and the sale of carbon credits, scale and longevity could be achieved. “Some folks may do this, but they never do this as part of the business,” he said. “It comes from not a corporate responsibility. It’s about, really, the business that you can optimize.” So far, BTG has raised $630 million for the initiative and earmarked 270,000 hectares, an area more than double the city of Los Angeles. The first farm in the plan, located on a 24,000-hectare cattle ranch, was called Project Alpha. The location, Wishnie said, was confidential.  “We talk about restoration as if it’s a thing that happens,” Mark Wishnie said, promoting BTG’s plans to intermingle new farms alongside native preserves.COURTESY OF BTG But a property of that size sticks out, even in a land of large farms. It didn’t take very much digging into municipal land records in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul, where many of the company’s Cerrado holdings are located, to turn up a recently sold farm that matched the size. It was called Fazenda Engano, or “Deception Farm”—hence the rebrand. The land was registered to an LLC with links to holding companies for other BTG eucalyptus plantations located in a neighboring region that locals had taken to calling the Cellulose Valley for its fast-expanding tree farms and pulp factories.   The area was largely seen as a land of opportunity, even as some locals had raised the alarm over concerns that the land couldn’t handle the trees. They had allies in prominent ecologists who have long questioned the wisdom of tree-planting in the Cerrado—and increasingly spar with other conservationists who see great potential in turning pasture into forest. The fight has only gotten more heated as more investors hunt for new climate solutions.  Still, where Apple goes, others often follow. And when it comes to sustainability, other companies look to it as a leader. I wasn’t sure if I could visit Project Alpha and see whether Apple and its partners had really found a better way to plant, but I started making plans to go to the Cerrado anyway, to see the forests behind those little green leaves on the box.  Complex calculations In 2015, a study by Thomas Crowther, an ecologist then at ETH Zürich, attempted a census of global tree cover, finding more than 3 trillion trees in all. A useful number, surprisingly hard to divine, like counting insects or bacteria.  A follow-up study a few years later proved more controversial: Earth’s surface held space for at least 1 trillion more trees. That represented a chance to store 200 metric gigatons, or about 25%, of atmospheric carbon once they matured. (The paper was later corrected in multiple ways, including an acknowledgment that the carbon storage potential could be about one-third less.) The study became a media sensation, soon followed by a fleet of tree-planting initiatives with “trillion” in the name—most prominently through a World Economic Forum effort launched by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at Davos, which President Donald Trump pledged to support during his first term.  But for as long as tree planting has been heralded as a good deed—from Johnny Appleseed to programs that promise a tree for every shoe or laptop purchased—the act has also been chased closely by a follow-up question: How many of those trees survive? Consider Trump’s most notable planting, which placed an oak on the White House grounds in 2018. It died just over a year later.  During President Donald Trump’s first term, he and French President Emmanuel Macron planted an oak on the South Lawn of the White House.CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES To critics, including Bill Gates, the efforts were symbolic of short-term thinking at the expense of deeper efforts to cut or remove carbon. (Gates’s spat with Benioff descended to name-calling in the New York Times. “Are we the science people or are we the idiots?” he asked.) The lifespan of a tree, after all, is brief—a pit stop—compared with the thousand-year carbon cycle, so its progeny must carry the torch to meaningfully cancel out emissions. Most don’t last that long.  “The number of trees planted has become a kind of currency, but it’s meaningless,” Pedro Brancalion, a professor of tropical forestry at the University of São Paulo, told me. He had nothing against the trees, which the world could, in general, use a lot more of. But to him, a lot of efforts were riding more on “good vibes” than on careful strategy.  Soon after arriving in São Paulo last summer, I drove some 150 miles into the hills outside the city to see the outdoor lab Brancalion has filled with experiments on how to plant trees better: trees given too many nutrients or too little; saplings monitored with wires and tubes like ICU admits, or skirted with tarps that snatch away rainwater. At the center of one of Brancalion’s plots stands a tower topped with a whirling station, the size of a hobby drone, monitoring carbon going in and out of the air (and, therefore, the nearby vegetation)—a molecular tango known as flux.  Brancalion works part-time for a carbon-focused restoration company, Re:Green, which had recently sold 3 million carbon credits to Microsoft and was raising a mix of native trees in parts of the Amazon and the Atlantic Forest. While most of the trees in his lab were native ones too, like jacaranda and brazilwood, he also studies eucalyptus. The lab in fact sat on a former eucalyptus farm; in the heart of his fields, a grove of 80-year-old trees dripped bark like molting reptiles.  To Pedro Brancalion, a lot of tree-planting efforts were riding more on “good vibes” than on careful strategy. He experiments with new ways to grow eucalyptus interspersed with native species.PABLO ALBARENGA Eucalyptus planting swelled dramatically under Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1960s. The goal was self-sufficiency—a nation’s worth of timber and charcoal, quickly—and the expansion was fraught. Many opinions of the tree were forged in a spate of dubious land seizures followed by clearing of the existing vegetation—disputes that, in some places, linger to this day. Still, that campaign is also said to have done just as Wishnie described, easing the demand that would have been put on regions like the Amazon as Rio and São Paulo were built.  The new trees also laid the foundation for Brazil to become a global hub for engineered forestry; it’s currently home to about a third of the world’s farmed eucalyptus. Today’s saplings are the products of decades of tinkering with clonal breeding, growing quick and straight, resistant to pestilence and drought, with exacting growth curves that chart biomass over time: Seven years to maturity is standard for pulp. Trees planted today grow more than three times as fast as their ancestors.  If the goal is a trillion trees, or many millions of tons of carbon, no business is better suited to keeping count than timber. It might sound strange to claim carbon credits for trees that you plan to chop down and turn into toilet paper or chairs. Whatever carbon is stored in those ephemeral products is, of course, a blip compared with the millennia that CO2 hangs in the atmosphere.  But these carbon projects take a longer view. While individual trees may go, more trees are planted. The forest constantly regrows and recaptures carbon from the air. Credits are issued annually over decades, so long as the long-term average of the carbon stored in the grove continues to increase. What’s more, because the timber is constantly being tracked, the carbon is easy to measure, solving a key problem with carbon credits.  Most mature native ecosystems, whether tropical forests or grasslands, will eventually store more carbon than a tree farm. But that could take decades. Eucalyptus can be planted immediately, with great speed, and the first carbon credits are issued in just a few years. “It fits a corporate model very well, and it fits the verification model very well,” said Robin Chazdon, a forest researcher at Australia’s University of the Sunshine Coast. Today’s eucalyptus saplings—shown here in Brancalion’s lab—are the products of decades of tinkering with clonal breeding, growing quick and straight.PABLO ALBARENGA Reliability and stability have also made eucalyptus, as well as pine, quietly dominant in global planting efforts. A 2019 analysis published in Nature found that 45% of carbon removal projects the researchers studied worldwide involved single-species tree farms. In Brazil, the figure was 82%. The authors called this a “scandal,” accusing environmental organizations and financiers of misleading the public and pursuing speed and convenience at the expense of native restoration.   In 2023, the nonprofit Verra, the largest bearer of carbon credit standards, said it would forbid projects using “non-native monocultures”—that is, plants like eucalyptus or pine that don’t naturally grow in the places where they’re being farmed. The idea was to assuage concerns that carbon credits were going to plantations that would have been built anyway given the demand for wood, meaning they wouldn’t actually remove any extra carbon from the atmosphere. The uproar was immediate—from timber companies, but also from carbon developers and NGOs. How would it be possible to scale anything—conservation, carbon removal—without them? Verra reversed course several months later. It would allow non-native monocultures so long as they grew in land that was deemed “degraded,” or previously cleared of vegetation—land like cattle pasture. And it took steps to avoid counting plantings in close proximity to other areas of fast tree growth, the idea being that they wanted to avoid rewarding purely industrial projects that would’ve been planted anyway.  Despite potential benefits of intermixing them, foresters generally prefer to keep separate eucalyptus and native species.PABLO ALBARENGA Brancalion happened to agree with the criticisms of exotic monocultures. But all the same, he believed eucalyptus had been unfairly demonized. It was a marvelous genus, actually, with nearly 800 species with unique adaptations. Natives could be planted as monocultures too, or on stolen land, or tended with little care. He had been testing ways to turn eucalyptus from perceived foes into friends of native forest restoration. His idea was to use rows of eucalyptus, which rocket above native species, as a kind of stabilizer. While these natives can be valuable—either as lumber or for biodiversity—they may grow slowly, or twist in ways that make their wood unprofitable, or suddenly and inexplicably die. It’s never like that with eucalyptus, which are wonderfully predictable growers. Eventually, their harvested wood would help pay for the hard work of growing the others.  In practice, foresters have generally preferred to keep things separate. Eucalyptus here; restoration there. It was far more efficient. The approach was emblematic, Brancalion thought, of letting the economics of the industry guide what was planted, how, and where, even with green finance involved. Though he admitted he was speaking as something of a competitor given his own carbon work, he was perplexed by Apple’s choices. The world’s richest company was doing eucalyptus? And with a bank better known locally as a major investor in industries, like beef and soy, that contributed to deforestation than any efforts for native restoration. It also worried him to see the planting happening west of here, in the Cerrado, where land is cheaper and also, for much of the year, drier. “It’s like a bomb,” Brancalion told me. “You can come interview me in five, six years. You don’t have to be super smart to realize what will happen after planting too many eucalyptus in a dry region.” He wished me luck on my journey westward.    The sacrifice zone Savanna implies openness, but the European settlers passing through the Cerrado called it the opposite; the name literally means “closed.” Grasses and shrubs grow to chest height, scaled as if to maximize human inconvenience. A machete is advised.  As I headed with Borzone toward a small nature preserve called Parque do Pombo, she told me that young Brazilians are often raised with a sense of dislike, if not fear, of this land. When Borzone texted her mother, a local biologist, to say where we were going, she replied: “I hear that place is full of ticks.” (Her intel, it turned out, was correct.) At one point, even prominent ecologists, fearing total destruction of the Amazon, advocated moving industry to the Cerrado, invoking a myth about casting a cow into infested waters so that the other cows could ford downstream.PABLO ALBARENGA What can be easy to miss is the fantastic variety of these plants, the result of natural selection cranked into overdrive. Species, many of which blew in from the Amazon, survived by growing deep roots through the acidic soil and thicker bark to resist regular brush fires. Many of the trees developed the ability to shrivel upon themselves and drop their leaves during the long, dry winter. Some call it a forest that has grown upside down, because much of the growth occurs in the roots. The Cerrado is home to 12,000 flowering plant species, 4,000 of which are found only there. In terms of biodiversity, it is second in the world only to its more famous neighbor, the Amazon.  Pequi is an edible fruit-bearing tree common in the Cerrado—one of the many unique species native to the area.ADOBE STOCK Each stop on our drive seemed to yield a new treasure for Borzone to show me: Guavira, a tree that bears fruit in grape-like bunches that appear only two weeks in a year; it can be made into a jam that is exceptionally good on toast. Pequi, more divisive, like fermented mango mixed with cheese. Others bear names Borzone can only faintly recall in the Indigenous Guaraní language and is thus unable to google. Certain uses are more memorable: Give this one here, a tiny frond that looks like a miniature Christmas fir, to make someone get pregnant. Borzone had grown up in the heart of the savanna, and the land had changed significantly since she was a kid going to the river every weekend with her family. Since the 1970s, about half of the savanna has been cleared, mostly for ranching and, where the soil is good, soybeans. At that time, even prominent ecologists, fearing total destruction of the Amazon, advocated moving industry here, invoking what Brazilians call the boi de piranha—a myth about casting a cow into infested waters so that the other cows could ford downstream.  Toby Pennington, a Cerrado ecologist at the University of Exeter, told me it remains a sacrificial zone, at times faring worse when environmentally minded politicians are in power. In 2023, when deforestation fell by half in the Amazon, it rose by 43% in the Cerrado. Some ecologists warn that this ecosystem could be entirely gone in the next decade. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s a certain prickliness among grassland researchers, who are, like their chosen flora, used to being trampled. In 2019, 46 of them authored a response in Science to Crowther’s trillion-trees study, arguing not about tree counting but about the land he proposed for reforestation. Much of it, they argued, including places like the Cerrado, was not appropriate for so many trees. It was too much biomass for the land to handle. (If their point was not already clear, the scientists later labeled the phenomenon “biome awareness disparity,” or BAD.) “It’s a controversial ecosystem,” said Natashi Pilon, a grassland ecologist at the University of Campinas near São Paulo. “With Cerrado, you have to forget everything that you learn about ecology, because it’s all based in forest ecology. In the Cerrado, everything works the opposite way. Burning? It’s good. Shade? It’s not good.” The Cerrado contains a vast range of landscapes, from grassy fields to wooded forests, but the majority of it is poorly suited to certain rules of carbon finance, she explained, that would incentivize people to protect or restore it. While the underground forest stores plenty of carbon, it builds up its stock slowly and can be difficult to measure.  The result is a slightly uncomfortable position for ecologists studying and trying to protect a vanishing landscape. Pilon and her former academic advisor, Giselda Durigan, a Cerrado ecologist at the Environmental Research Institute of the State of São Paulo and one of the scientists behind BAD, have gotten accustomed to pushing back on people who arrived preaching “improvement” through trees—first from nonprofits, mostly of the trillion-trees variety, but now from the timber industry. “They are using the carbon discourse as one more argument to say that business is great,” Durigan told me. “They are happy to be seen as the good guys.”  Durigan saw tragedy in the way that Cerrado had been transformed into cattle pasture in just a generation, but there was also opportunity in restoring it once the cattle left. Bringing the Cerrado back would be hard work—usually requiring fire and hacking away at invasive grasses. But even simply leaving it alone could allow the ecosystem to begin to repair itself and offer something like the old savanna habitat. Abandoned eucalyptus farms, by contrast, were nightmares to return to native vegetation; the strange Cerrado plants refused to take root in the highly modified soil.  In recent years, Durigan had visited hundreds of eucalyptus farms in the area, shadowing her students who had been hired by timber companies to help establish promised corridors of native vegetation in accordance with federal rules. “They’re planting entire watersheds,” she said. “The rivers are dying.”  Durigan saw plants in isolated patches growing taller than they normally would, largely thanks to the suppression of regular brush fires. They were throwing shade on the herbs and grasses and drawing more water. The result was an environment gradually choking on itself, at risk of collapse during drought and retaining only a fraction of the Cerrado’s original diversity. If this was what people meant by bringing back the Cerrado, she believed it was only hastening its ultimate disappearance.  In a recent survey of the watershed around the Parque do Pombo, which is hemmed in on each side by eucalyptus, two other researchers reported finding “devastation” and turned to Plato’s description of Attica’s forests, cleared to build the city of Athens: “What remains now compared to what existed is like the skeleton of a sick man … All the rich and soft soil has dissolved, leaving the country of skin and bones.”  A highway runs through the Cellulose Valley, connecting commercial eucalyptus farms and pulp factories.PABLO ALBARENGA After a long day of touring the land—and spinning out on the clay—we found that our fuel was low. The Parque do Pombo groundskeeper looked over at his rusting fuel tank and apologized. It had been spoiled by the last rain. At least, he said, it was all downhill to the highway.  The road of opportunity We only made it about halfway down the eucalyptus-lined road. After the car huffed and left us stranded, Borzone and I started walking toward the highway, anticipating a long night. We remembered locals’ talk of jaguars recently pushed into the area by development.  But after only 30 minutes or so, a set of lights came into view across the plain. Then another, and another. Then the outline of a tractor, a small tanker truck, and, somewhat curiously, a tour bus. The gear and the vehicles bore the logo of Suzano, the world’s largest pulp and paper company. After talking to a worker, we boarded the empty tour bus and were taken to a cluster of spotlit tents, where women prepared eucalyptus seedlings, stacking crates of them on white fold-out tables. A night shift like this one was unusual. But they were working around the clock—aiming to plant a million trees per day across Suzano’s farms, in preparation for opening the world’s largest pulp factory just down the highway. It would open in a few weeks with a capacity of 2.55 million metric tons of pulp per year.  Eucalyptus has become the region’s new lifeblood. “I’m going to plant some eucalyptus / I’ll get rich and you’ll fall in love with me,” sings a local country duo. PABLO ALBARENGA The tour bus was standing by to take the workers down the highway at 1 a.m., arriving in the nearest city, Três Lagoas, by 3 a.m. to pick up the next shift. “You don’t do this work without a few birds at home to feed,” a driver remarked as he watched his colleagues filling holes in the field by the light of their headlamps. After getting permission from his boss, he drove us an hour each way to town to the nearest gas station. This highway through the Cellulose Valley has become known as a road of opportunity, with eucalyptus as the region’s new lifeblood after the cattle industry shrank its footprint. Not far from the new Suzano factory, a popular roadside attraction is an oversize sculpture of a black bull at the gates of a well-known ranch. The ranch was recently planted, and the bull is now guarded by a phalanx of eucalyptus.  On TikTok, workers post selfies and views from tractors in the nearby groves, backed by a song from the local country music duo Jads e Jadson. “I’m going to plant some eucalyptus / I’ll get rich and you’ll fall in love with me,” sings a down-on-his-luck man at risk of losing his fiancée. Later, when he cuts down the trees and becomes a wealthy man with better options, he cuts off his betrothed, too.  The race to plant more eucalyptus here is backed heavily by the state government, which last year waived environmental requirements for new farms on pasture and hopes to quickly double its area in just a few years. The trees were an important component of Brazil’s plan to meet its global climate commitments, and the timber industry was keen to cash in. Companies like Suzano have already proposed that tens of thousands of their hectares become eligible for carbon credits.  What’s top of mind for everyone, though, is worsening fires. Even when we visited in midwinter, the weather was hot and dry. The wider region was in a deep drought, perhaps the worst in 700 years, and in a few weeks, one of the worst fire seasons ever would begin. Suzano would be forced to make a rare pause in its planting when soil temperatures reached 154 °F.  Posted along the highway are constant reminders of the coming danger: signs, emblazoned with the logos of a dozen timber companies, that read “FOGO ZERO,” or “ZERO FIRE.”  The race to plant more eucalyptus is backed heavily by the state government, which hopes to quickly double its area in just a few years.PABLO ALBARENGA In other places struck by megafires, like Portugal and Chile, eucalyptus has been blamed for worsening the flames. (The Chilean government has recently excluded pine and eucalyptus farms from its climate plans.) But here in Brazil, where climate change is already supersizing the blazes, the industry offers sophisticated systems to detect and suppress fires, argued Calmon of Conservation International. “You really need to protect it because that’s your asset,” he said. (BTG also noted that in parts of the Cerrado where human activity has increased, fires have decreased.)  Eucalyptus is often portrayed as impossibly thirsty compared with other trees, but Calmon pointed out it is not uniquely so. In some parts of the Cerrado, it has been found to consume four times as much water as native vegetation; in others, the two landscapes have been roughly in line. It depends on many factors—what type of soil it’s planted in, what Cerrado vegetation coexists with it, how intensely the eucalyptus is farmed. Timber companies, which have no interest in seeing their own plantations run dry, invest heavily in managing water. Another hope, Wishnie told me, is that by vastly increasing the forest canopy, the new eucalyptus will actually gather moisture and help produce rain.  Marine Dubos-Raoul has tracked waves of planting in the Cerrado for years and has spoken to residents who worry about how the trees strain local water supplies.PABLO ALBARENGA That’s a common narrative and one that’s been taught in schools here in Três Lagoas for decades, Borzone explained when we met up the day after our rescue with Marine Dubos-Raoul, a local geographer and university professor, and two of her students. Dubos-Raoul laughed uneasily. If this idea about rain was in fact true, they hadn’t seen it here. They crouched around the table at the cafe, speaking in a hush; their opinions weren’t particularly popular in this lumber town. Dubos-Raoul had long tracked the impacts of the waves of planting on longtime rural residents, who complained that industry had taken their water or sprayed their gardens with pesticides.  The evidence tying the trees to water problems in the region, Dubos-Raoul admitted, is more anecdotal than data driven. But she heard it in conversation after conversation. “People would have tears in their eyes,” she said. “It was very clear to them that it was connected to the arrival of the eucalyptus.” (Since our meeting, a study, carried out in response to demands from local residents, has blamed the planting for 350 depleted springs in the area, sparking a rare state inquiry into the issue.) In any case, Dubos-Raoul thought, it didn’t make much sense to keep adding matches to the tinderbox. Shortly after talking with Dubos-Raoul, we ventured to the town of Ribas do Rio Pardo to meet Charlin Castro at his family’s river resort. Suzano’s new pulp factory stood on the horizon, surrounded by one of the densest areas of planting in the region.  The Suzano pulp factory—the world’s largest—has pulled the once-sleepy town of Ribas do Rio Pardo into the bustling hub of Brazil’s eucalyptus industry.PABLO ALBARENGA Charlin Castro, his father Camilo, and other locals talk about how the area around the family’s river resort has changed since eucalyptus came to town. The public area for bathing on the far side of the shrinking river was closed after the Suzano pulp factory was installed. Charlin and Camilo admit they aren’t exactly sure what is causing low water levels—maybe it’s silt, maybe it’s the trees.PABLO ALBARENGA With thousands of workers arriving, mostly temporarily, to build the factory and plant the fields, the sleepy farming village had turned into a boomtown, and developed something of a lawless reputation—prostitution, homelessness, collisions between logging trucks and drunk drivers—and Castro was chronicling much of it for a hyperlocal Instagram news outlet, while also running for city council.  But overall, he was thankful to Suzano. The factory was transforming the town into a “a real place,” as he put it, even if change was at times painful.  His father, Camilo, gestured with a sinewy arm over to the water, where he recalled boat races involving canoes with crews of a dozen. That was 30 years ago. It was impossible to imagine now as I watched a family cool off in this bend in the river, the water just knee deep. But it’s hard to say what exactly is causing the low water levels. Perhaps it’s silt from the ranches, Charlin suggested. Or a change in the climate. Or, maybe, it could be the trees.  Upstream, Ana Claudia (who goes by “Tica”) and Antonio Gilberto Lima were more certain what was to blame. The couple, who are in their mid-60s, live in a simple brick house surrounded by fruit trees. They moved there a decade ago, seeking a calm retirement—one of a hundred or so families taking part in land reforms that returned land to smallholders. But recently, life has been harder. To preserve their well, they had let their vegetable garden go to seed. Streams were dry, and the old pools in the pastures where they used to fish were gone, replaced by trees; tapirs were rummaging through their garden, pushed, they believed, by lack of habitat.  Ana Cláudia and Antonio Gilberto Lima have seen their land struggle since eucalyptus plantations took over the region.PABLO ALBARENGA Plants attacked by hungry insects at their home. Pollinators like these stingless bees must fly greater distances to collect pollen they need when faced with a lack of variety of native plant species. They were surrounded by eucalyptus, planted in waves with the arrival of each new factory. No one was listening, they told me, as the cattle herd bellowed outside the door. “The trees are sad,” Gilberto said, looking out over his few dozen pale-humped animals grazing around scattered Cerrado species left in the paddock. Tica told me she knew that paper and pulp had to come from somewhere, and that many people locally were benefiting. But the downsides were getting overlooked, she thought. They had signed a petition to the government, organized by Dubos-Raoul, seeking to rein in the industry. Perhaps, she hoped, it could reach American investors, too.  The green halo  A few weeks before my trip, BTG had decided it was ready to show off Project Alpha. The visit was set for my last day in Brazil; the farm formerly known as Fazenda Engano was further upriver in Camapuã, a town that borders Ribas do Rio Pardo. It was a long, circuitous drive north to get out there, but it wouldn’t be that way much longer; a new highway was being paved that would directly connect the two towns, part of an initiative between the timber industry and government to expand the cellulose hub northward. A local official told me he expected tens of thousands of hectares of eucalyptus in the next few years. For now, though, it was still the frontier. The intention was to plant “well outside the forest sector,” Wishnie told me—not directly in the shadow of a mill, but close enough for the operation to be practical, with access to labor and logistics. That distance was important evidence that the trees would store more carbon than what’s accounted for in a business-as-usual scenario. The other guarantee was the restoration. It wasn’t good business to buy land and not plant every acre you could with timber. It was made possible only with green investments from Apple and others. That morning, Wishnie had emailed me a press release announcing that Microsoft had joined Apple in seeking help from BTG to help meet its carbon demands. The technology giant had made the largest-ever purchase of carbon credits, representing 8 million tons of CO2, from Project Alpha, following smaller commitments from TSMC and Murata, two of Apple’s suppliers.  I was set to meet Carlos Guerreiro, head of Latin American operations for BTG’s timber subsidiary, at a gas station in town, where we would set off together for the 24,000-hectare property. A forester in Brazil for much of his life, he had flown in from his home near São Paulo early that morning; he planned to check out the progress of the planting at Project Alpha and then swing down to the bank’s properties across the Cellulose Valley, where BTG was finalizing a $376 million deal to sell land to Suzano.  BTG plans to mix preserves of native restoration and eucalyptus farms and eventually reach a 50-50 mix on their properties.COURTESY OF BTG Guerreiro defended BTG’s existing holdings as sustainable engines of development in the region. But all the same, Project Alpha felt like a new beginning for the company, he told me. About a quarter of this property had been left untouched when the pasture was first cleared in the 1980s, but the plan now was to restore an additional 13% of the property to native Cerrado plants, bringing the total to 37%. (BTG says it will protect more land on future farms to arrive at its 50-50 target.) Individual patches of existing native vegetation would be merged with others around the property, creating a 400-meter corridor that largely followed the streams and rivers—beyond the 60 meters required by law.  The restoration work was happening with the help of researchers from a Brazilian university, though they were still testing the best methods. We stood over trenches that had been planted with native seeds just weeks before, shoots only starting to poke out of the dirt. Letting the land regenerate on its own was often preferable, Guerreiro told me, but the best approach would depend on the specifics of each location. In other places, assistance with planting or tending or clearing back the invasive grasses could be better.  The approach of largely letting things be was already yielding results, he noted: In parts of the property that hadn’t been grazed in years, they could already see the hardscrabble Cerrado clawing back with a vengeance. They’d been marveling at the fauna, caught on camera traps: tapirs, anteaters, all kinds of birds. They had even spotted a jaguar. The project would ensure that this growth would continue for decades. The land wouldn’t be sold to another rancher and go back to looking like other parts of the property, which were regularly cleared of native habitat. The hope, he said, was that over time the regenerating ecosystems would store more carbon, and generate more credits, than the eucalyptus. (The company intends to submit its carbon plans to Verra later this year.) We stopped for lunch at the dividing line between the preserve and the eucalyptus, eating ham sandwiches in the shade of the oldest trees on the property, already two stories tall and still, by Guerreiro’s estimate, putting on a centimeter per day. He was planting at a rate of 40,000 seedlings per day in neat trenches filled with white lime to make the sandy Cerrado soil more inviting. In seven years or so, half of the trees will be thinned and pulped. The rest will keep growing. They’ll stand for seven years longer and grow thick and firm enough for plywood. The process will then start anew. Guerreiro described a model where clusters of farms mixed with preserves like this one will be planted around mills throughout the Cerrado. But nothing firm had been decided. “Under no circumstances should planting eucalyptus ever be considered a viable project to receive carbon credits in the Cerrado,” said Lucy Rowland, an expert on the region at the University of Exeter.PABLO ALBARENGA This experiment, Wishnie told me later, could have a big payoff. The important thing, he reminded me, was that stretches of the Cerrado would be protected at a scale no one had achieved before—something that wouldn’t happen without eucalyptus. He strongly disagreed with the scientists who said eucalyptus didn’t fit here. The government had analyzed the watershed, he explained, and he was confident the land could support the trees. At the end of the day, the choice was between doing something and doing nothing. “We talk about restoration as if it’s a thing that happens,” he said.  When I asked Pilon to take a look at satellite imagery and photos of the property, she was unimpressed. It looked to her like yet another misguided attempt at planting trees in an area that had once naturally been a dense savanna. (Her assessment is supported by a land survey from the 1980s that classified this land as a typical Cerrado ecosystem—some trees, but mostly shrubbery. BTG responded that the survey was incorrect and the satellite images clearly showed a closed-canopy forest.)  As Lucy Rowland, an expert on the region at the University of Exeter and another BAD signatory, put it: “Under no circumstances should planting eucalyptus ever be considered a viable project to receive carbon credits in the Cerrado.”  Over months of reporting, the way that both sides spoke in absolutes about how to save this vanishing ecosystem had become familiar. Chazdon, the Australia-based forest researcher, told me she too felt that the tenor of the argument over how and where to grow has become more vehement as demand for tree-based carbon removal has intensified. “Nobody’s a villain,” she said. “There are disconnects on both sides.” Chazdon had been excited to hear about BTG’s project. It was, she thought, the type of thing that was sorely needed in conservation—mixing profitable enterprises with an approach to restoration that considers the wider landscape. “I can understand why the Cerrado ecologists are up in arms,” she said. “They get the feeling that nobody cares about their ecosystems.” But demands for ecological purity could indeed get in the way of doing much of anything—especially in places like the Cerrado, where laws and financing favor destruction over restoration.  Still, thinking about the scale of the carbon removal problem, she considered it sensible to wonder about the future that was being hatched. While there is, in fact, a limit to how much additional land the world needs for pulp and plywood products in the near future, there is virtually no limit to how much land it could devote to sequestering carbon. Which means we need to ask hard questions about the best way to use it.  More eucalyptus may be good to make claims about greener paper products, but some argue it’s harder to do for laptops and smart watches and ChatGPT queries.PABLO ALBARENGA It was true, Chazdon said, that planting eucalyptus in the Cerrado was an act of destruction—it’d make that land nearly impossible to recover. The areas preserved in between them would also likely struggle to fully renew itself, without fire or clearing. She would feel more comfortable with such large-scale projects if the bar for restoration were much higher—say, 75% or more. But that almost certainly wouldn’t satisfy her grassland colleagues who don’t want any eucalyptus at all. And it might not fit the profit model—the flywheel that Apple and others are seeking in order to scale up carbon removal fast.  Barbara Haya, who studies carbon offsets at the University of California, Berkeley, encouraged me to think about all of it differently. The improvements to planting eucalyptus here, at this farm, could be a perfectly good thing for this industry, she said. Perhaps they merit some claim about greener toilet paper or plywood. Haya would leave that debate to the ecologists. But we weren’t talking about toilet paper or plywood. We were talking about laptops and smart watches and ChatGPT. And the path to connecting those things to these trees was more convoluted. The carbon had to be disentangled first from the wood’s other profitable uses and then from the wider changes that were happening in this region and its industries. There seemed to be many plausible scenarios for where this land was heading. Was eucalyptus the only feasible route for carbon to find its way here?  Haya is among the experts who argue that the idea of precisely canceling out corporate emissions to reach carbon neutrality is a broken one. That’s not to say protecting nature can’t help fight climate change. Conserving existing forests and grasslands, for example, could often yield greater carbon and biodiversity benefits in the long run than planting new forests. But the carbon math used to justify those efforts was often fuzzier. This makes every claim of carbon neutrality fragile and drives companies toward projects that are easier to prove, she thinks, but perhaps have less impact.  One idea is that companies should instead shift to a “contribution” model that tracks how much money they put toward climate mitigation, without worrying about the exact amount of carbon removed. “Let’s say the goal is to save the Cerrado,” Haya said. “Could they put that same amount of money and really make a difference?” Such an approach, she pointed out, could help finance the preservation of those last intact Cerrado remnants. Or it could fund restoration, even if the restored vegetation takes years to grow or sometimes needs to burn.  The approach raises its own questions—about how to measure the impact of those investments and what kinds of incentives would motivate corporations to act. But it’s a vision that has gained more popularity as scrutiny of carbon credits grows and the options available to companies narrow. With the current state of the world, “what private companies do matters more than ever,” Haya told me. “We need them not to waste money.”  In the meantime, it’s up to the consumer reading the label to decide what sort of path we’re on.  “There’s nothing wrong with the trees,” geographer and translator Clariana Vilela Borzone said. “I have to remind myself of that.”PABLO ALBARENGA Before we left the farm, Borzone and I had one more task: to plant a tree. The sun was getting low over Project Alpha when I was handed an iron contraption that cradled a eucalyptus seedling, pulled from a tractor piled with plants.  “There’s nothing wrong with the trees,” Borzone had said earlier, squinting up at the row of 18-month-old eucalyptus, their fluttering leaves flashing in the hot wind as if in an ill-practiced burlesque show. “I have to remind myself of that.” But still it felt strange putting one in the ground. We were asking so much of it, after all. And we were poised to ask more. I squeezed the handle, pulling the iron hinge taut and forcing the plant deep into the soil. It poked out at a slight angle that I was sure someone else would need to fix later, or else this eucalyptus tree would grow askew. I was slow and clumsy in my work, and by the time I finished, the tractor was far ahead of us, impossibly small on the horizon. The worker grabbed the tool from my hand and headed toward it, pushing seedlings down as he went, hurried but precise, one tree after another. Gregory Barber is a journalist based in San Francisco.  This story was produced in partnership with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, as well as support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Microsoft has released a good number of first-party titles for the PlayStation 5 by now, but the next one in line might arguably be the biggest one yet. Forza Horizon 5 is set to release for Sony’s console not long from now, and Microsoft has released a new trailer to commemorate its looming launch. Check it out below.  Forza Horizon 5 takes place in an open world Mexico setting, while the PS5 version of the game, which is developed by Panic Button, also includes its two expansions – Rally Adventure and Hot Wheels – alongside the base experience.  Forza Horizon 5 is currently available on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC. It launches for PS5 on April 29, while those who purchase the Premium Edition will get access a handful of days early, on April 25. Leaks have claimed that the open world title is also in development for the Nintendo Switch 2. 

Thursday, April 24th, 2025 Posted by Jim Thacker Chaos releases Corona 12 Update 2 for 3ds Max and Cinema 4D html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd" Chaos has released Corona 12 Update 2, the latest version of its production renderer for architectural visualization and portfolio rendering in 3ds Max and Cinema 4D. The update adds over 3,100 scanned real-world materials from Chaos Scans to the Cosmos library, and improves handling of volumetric effects and depth of field. Over 3,100 scanned materials from Chaos Scans now available in the Cosmos library The headline change in Corona 12 Update 2 is that over 3,100 scanned real-world materials from the Chaos Scans online library have been added to the Cosmos library. That makes it possible to drag and drop them directly into a scene, rather than having to import them manually. The scans provided include metal, leather, paper, plastic, rubber, and packaging materials. According to the video above, there is “no change to who gets access to scans”, although the Cosmos library is available to all subscribers, whereas Chaos Scans is only included in Premium subscriptions. We’ve contacted Chaos to clarify this, and will update if we hear back. The update also includes 18 new LUTs created by visualization artist Iraban Dutta. Both host applications: better handling of volumetric effects and depth of field Workflow changes common to both host applications include a per-camera Global Volume override in the Corona Camera, for more control over volumetric effects like fog and haze. The experimental DOF Highlights Solver, which increases the speed at which depth of field effects render, at the expense of slower rendering of other effects, now gives correct results when highlights are seen in reflections or some refractions. 3ds Max only: faster timeline scrubbing 3ds Max users get faster timeline scrubbing when interactive rendering is enabled, and an update to the live link to Vantage, Chaos’s real-time renderer. Cinema 4D only: automatic conversion of more common V-Ray objects and materials Cinema 4D users get support for for more objects and material types in the Scene Converter, which automatically converts scenes originally created for the V-Ray renderer. That includes common objects like V-Ray Proxy and V-Ray Clipper; the V-Ray Triplanar, V-Ray Two-Sided, and V-Ray Blend materials; and the V-Ray Decal and V-Ray Enmesh systems. There is also new minimap in the Node Material editor, helping to navigate complex materials. Updates to Chaos Cloud and Anima Outside the core application, functionality for creating immersive virtual tours has been added to Chaos Cloud, Chaos’s cloud rendering platform. Corona is also compatible with Anima 6, the latest version of Chaos’s crowd animation system for 3ds Max and Cinema 4D, which added a new traffic simulation system. Price and system requirements Corona 12 Update 2 is compatible with 3ds Max 2016+ and Cinema 4D R17+. The software is available subscription-only. Corona Solo subscriptions are node-locked, and include access to the Chaos Cosmos asset library; Corona Premium subscriptions are floating, and also include Phoenix, Chaos Player and Chaos Scans. Corona Solo subscriptions cost $59.90/month or $394.80/year. Corona Premium subscriptions cost $72.90/month or $514.80/year. Additional Corona Render nodes cost $172. Read a full list of new features in Corona 12 Update 2 on Chaos’s blog Find more details of the new features in Corona 12 Update 2 in the online documentation Have your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we don’t post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects. Latest News Adobe releases Photoshop 26.6 Check out the new features in the image-editing software, including nifty new Select Details options in the AI-based Object Selection tool. Thursday, April 24th, 2025 Chaos releases Corona 12 Update 2 for 3ds Max and Cinema 4D Update to the renderer adds over 3,100 Chaos Scans materials to the Cosmos library, and improves DoF and volumetric effects. Thursday, April 24th, 2025 Get 260+ modular Wild West building assets for Unreal Engine Get JustB Studios' 1850s Post Office Environment pack of 3D assets for free for two weeks on the Fab marketplace. For commercial use. Wednesday, April 23rd, 2025 Get VFX artist Thomas Marcos' free Blender clouds shader Lightweight Procedural Clouds Shader generates realistic clouds in production conditions, and works with the Cycles or Eevee renderers. Wednesday, April 23rd, 2025 NVIDIA open-sources PhysX's GPU simulation code Real-time physics framework used in game engines and offline simulation tools for 3ds Max and Maya is now fully open-source. Tuesday, April 22nd, 2025 Hair Cinematic Tool 2.0 simplifies hair shading in Unreal Engine 5 Argentum Studio's in-house tool simplifies the process of lighting and rendering hair and fur in Unreal Engine 5.5. Free for a month. Tuesday, April 22nd, 2025 More News Tutorial: Creature Animation for Games LightWave Digital releases LightWave 2025 Get the free version of ZibraVDB for Unreal Engine and Houdini See JangaFX's first demo of IlluGen, its app for in-game VFX Autodesk releases Flame 2026 Character Creator gets new free MetaTailor plugin Epic Games releases Twinmotion 2025.1.1 Leopoly adds voxel sculpting to Shapelab 2025 Check out new 3ds Max UV unwrapping plugin UVReactor Reallusion releases iClone 8.53 with timecode support Anima 6.0 adds traffic simulation to Chaos's crowd animation tool ZibraVDB: the new standard in OpenVDB for virtual production Older Posts

Report: Intel to lay off 20% of its workforce Firm allegedly aiming to restructure company to "streamline management and rebuild an engineering-driven culture," may affect around 21,000 staff Image credit: Intel News by Sophie McEvoy Staff Writer Published on April 24, 2025 Intel is reportedly set to announce another round of layoffs, this time cutting 20% of its workforce – estimated to be around 21,000 employees. This is according to Bloomberg, with a source telling the publication that Intel is supposedly aiming to restructure the company to "eliminate bureaucracy" as well as "streamline management and rebuild an engineering-driven culture." A representative for Intel declined to comment to Bloomberg on the matter. The reported layoffs would take place under new CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who took over the role from interim CEOs David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston Holthaus last month. Former CEO Pat Gelsinger stepped down following his retirement in December 2024. During Gelsinger's tenure, Intel laid off 15,000 employees in August 2024 as part of its $10 billion cost restructure plan revealed during its Q2 2024 financial results. Gelsinger Intel was "making some of the most consequential changes [in] its history" as part of this decision. "We must align our cost structure with our new operating model and fundamentally change the way we operate," he said. "Our revenues have not grown as expected – and we've yet to fully benefit from powerful trends, like AI. Our costs are too high, our margins are too low."

LinkedIn is expanding its free verification system to the wider web, allowing external sites and platforms to integrate LinkedIn verification rather than building their own tool. Adobe is among the first companies to sign up.Adobe is integrating LinkedIn verification into its new Content Authenticity app and existing Behance portfolio platform, allowing creators who’ve gone through LinkedIn’s verification to display a “Verified on LinkedIn” badge on their profiles. If verified creators use Adobe’s digital Content Credentials tools, their identity will also appear alongside their work whenever it’s shared on LinkedIn.“It’s getting progressively cheaper and easier to pretend you’re someone you’re not online,” Oscar Rodriguez, LinkedIn’s vice president of trust, told The Verge. “You’re also able to do so in a way that looks more credible than ever before. Obviously authenticity is super important for LinkedIn, the platform is founded on this premise of trust.”“Online platforms across the board are facing the same issues around inauthenticity, so we believe that this collaboration with Adobe will be critical in the sense of empowering LinkedIn members and partners to be able to understand specific attributes of someone’s identity that have been verified.”This is how the “Verified on LinkedIn” badge looks on Adobe’s Behance portfolios. Image: LinkedIn / AdobeLinkedIn introduced verification in 2023, allowing users to confirm specific details such as their identity, workplace, or education history using government-issued ID or company emails. The company says that over 80 million people have verified themselves using the tools since then. Alongside Adobe, other early adopters of the expanded verification system include enterprise platforms TrustRadius, G2, and UserTesting.This week social media network Bluesky introduced its own verification system for “authentic and notable” accounts, aping its rival Twitter with a blue checkmark design. Twitter verification was once the de facto standard online — the company even partnered with Adobe on a Content Authenticity Initiative to attach attribution to images — before its verification program was wound down following Elon Musk’s purchase and the checkmark instead became exclusive to paying X Premium subscribers.See More:

Evaluating how well LLMs handle long contexts is essential, especially for retrieving specific, relevant information embedded in lengthy inputs. Many recent LLMs—such as Gemini-1.5, GPT-4, Claude-3.5, Qwen-2.5, and others—have pushed the boundaries of context length while striving to maintain strong reasoning abilities. To assess such capabilities, benchmarks like ∞Bench, LongBench, and L-Eval have been developed. However, these often overlook the “Needle-in-a-Haystack” (NIAH) task, which challenges models to retrieve a few critical pieces of information from predominantly irrelevant content. Earlier benchmarks, such as RULER and Counting-Stars, offered synthetic and simplistic NIAH setups, utilizing items like passwords or symbols. NeedleBench improved this by including more realistic, semantically meaningful needles and logical reasoning questions. Yet, it still lacks tasks involving the retrieval and correct ordering of sequential information, such as timestamps or procedural steps. Efforts to enhance LLMs’ long-context capabilities have employed methods like RoPE, ALiBi, and memory-based techniques, along with architectural changes seen in models like Mamba and FLASHBUTTERFLY. Modern LLMs now support extensive contexts—Gemini 1.5 and Kimi can process up to 1–2 million tokens. NIAH benchmarks assess how effectively models can extract relevant data from vast amounts of text, and NeedleBench further incorporates logical relationships to simulate real-world scenarios. Regarding evaluation, natural language generation (NLG) performance is typically assessed using metrics derived from LLMs, prompt-based evaluations, fine-tuned models, or human-LLM collaborations. While prompting alone often underperforms, fine-tuning and human-in-the-loop methods can greatly enhance evaluation accuracy and reliability. Researchers from Tencent YouTu Lab have introduced Sequential-NIAH, a benchmark designed to assess how well LLMs retrieve sequential information, referred to as a needle, from long texts. The benchmark includes synthetic, real, and open-domain QA needles embedded in contexts ranging from 8K to 128K tokens, totaling 14,000 samples. A synthetic data-trained evaluation model achieved 99.49% accuracy in judging the correctness and order of responses. However, tests on six popular LLMs showed the highest performance at just 63.15%, highlighting the difficulty of the task and the need for further advancement in long-context comprehension. The Sequential-NIAH benchmark is designed to evaluate models on retrieving sequentially ordered information (needles) from long texts (haystacks). It uses three types of QA synthesis pipelines: synthetic (generated events in order), real (extracted from temporal knowledge graphs), and open-domain QA (logically ordered answers). These QA pairs are inserted into diverse, long texts sourced from the LongData Corpus, covering various domains. To construct samples, the long text is segmented, needles are randomly shuffled and embedded, and the task is framed using prompt templates. The final dataset comprises 14,000 samples, split across training, development, and test sets, in both English and Chinese. The evaluation model was tested against Claude-3.5, GPT-4o, and others on 1,960 samples, achieving a 99.49% accuracy. This outperforms GPT-4o (96.07%) and Claude-3.5 (87.09%) by significant margins. In subsequent benchmark tests on 2,000 samples, Gemini-1.5 outperformed other models with an accuracy of 63.15%, while GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4o performed poorly. Performance varied with text length, number of needles, QA synthesis pipelines, and languages, with Gemini-1.5 maintaining stable results. A noise analysis revealed that minor perturbations had a negligible impact on accuracy, but larger shifts in needle positions reduced model consistency, particularly for Qwen-2.5 and LLaMA-3.3. In conclusion, the Sequential-NIAH benchmark assesses LLMs on their ability to extract sequential information from lengthy texts (up to 128,000 tokens). It includes synthetic, real, and open-domain question-answering pipelines, with 14,000 samples for training, development, and testing. Despite testing popular models like Claude, GPT-4.0, Gemini, LLaMA, and Qwen, none achieved high accuracy, with the best performing at 63.15%. A synthetic evaluation model achieved an accuracy of 99.49% on the test data. The benchmark also highlights the challenges of increasing context lengths and needle counts and is validated through noise robustness tests, making it valuable for advancing LLM research. Check out the Paper. Also, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and join our Telegram Channel and LinkedIn Group. Don’t Forget to join our 90k+ ML SubReddit. [Register Now] miniCON Virtual Conference on AGENTIC AI: FREE REGISTRATION + Certificate of Attendance + 4 Hour Short Event (May 21, 9 am- 1 pm PST) + Hands on Workshop The post Sequential-NIAH: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Extracting Sequential Information from Long Texts appeared first on MarkTechPost.

EA has added a paid season pass to FC 25 in a first for its long-running soccer series.The EA Sports FC 25 Premium Pass is live now in-game and can be obtained with the earnable in-game virtual currency (500,000 UT Coins) or the virtual currency paid for with real-world money (1,000 FC Points, which cost $9.99).The paid track includes exclusive content and, crucially, tradeable packs. This means players of Ultimate Team (FC’s most popular and controversial mode) can sell the rewards obtained in the Premium Pass to other players for in-game currency that can then be used to buy the next Premium Pass (assuming they earn enough coins from the sale of those items in the auction house, of course).Rewards include a number of powerful cards, such as Immortal Icon Franck Ribéry, and powerful Evolution consumables that are used to improve cards you already own.FC's first ever paid season pass. Image credit: EA Sports.Some players are already hitting out at EA for the decision, pointing out this $9.99 Premium Pass comes on top of what is already a premium game and, when it comes to Ultimate Team, an already heavily-monetized game mode. Critics are also suggesting that the Premium Pass offers a direct way to buy powerful cards which can then be used in competitive multiplayer.Others, however, are pointing out that you still need to level up to unlock most of the rewards, and you can pay for the premium track with coins earned through gameplay alone, so technically everything here is earnable by just playing.And effectively, Ultimate Team store packs already offer a direct purchase route, given there are many that now include guaranteed cards of a certain power level. However, this paid season pass is the closest EA has come to just letting fans buy Ultimate Team players directly.PlayThe addition of FC’s first ever paid season pass may be an attempt by EA to further monetize its money-spinner now the game is available at a heavily discounted price and ahead of FC 25’s expected arrival in console subscription services such as Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PlayStation Plus.It’s also worth noting that back in January EA lowered its financial forecast for its fiscal year, pointing to the “underperformance” of EA Sports FC 2025 (which accounted for the "majority" of the shortfall) and BioWare’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard.In a blog post, EA said the Premium Pass is “purely additive” and promised not to shift rewards from the standard tier of the Season Pass to the Premium Pass.“While our Season 7 Premium Pass rewards are locked in, we’ll be monitoring your feedback to make sure we deliver the best experience possible in whatever mode you play in FC moving forward,” EA said.The launch of the Premium Pass at the beginning of EA’s new financial year is telling (EA reports the results of its FY 2025 in May), and it looks like a clear set-up for the inevitable EA Sports FC 26. The question for EA is, will the Premium Pass do the business it needs without causing ruptions in its community?Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

After a long, WGA strike-mandated wait, the second season of 2022 Netflix hit Wednesday starring Jenna Ortega in the lead role is finally nigh, and this time the Addams Family are taking a step forward. Not only is Wednesday’s younger brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) joining Nevermore Academy this semester, but parents Morticia and Gomez (Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzmán) will also have “an increased presence on campus” according to the show’s creators. Tango instructors for this year’s annual Rave’N Dance, perhaps? The new trailer shows Pugsley in Nevermore uniform, using some new-found magical powers he appears to have inherited from his electricity-zapping Uncle Fester (Fred Armisen). We also see Morticia and Gomez trot out a few of their famous dance steps, and are given a glimpse of new characters Hester Frump (aka Grandmama) played by Joanna Lumley, and Principal Dort, played by Steve Buscemi. Take a look at the teaser trailer: It’s another two-batch delivery from Netflix, which is straddling the season’s release over two consecutive months. The first set of episodes will arrive on the streamer on Wednesday August 6, followed by the rest on Wednesday September 3. Pugsley’s debut at Nevermore won’t be a smooth one, according to creator Tim Burton, who says he feels for “Poor Pugsley” and describes him as “an outcast among outcasts.” Add to that the “rare new form of torture” that comes in the form of his and Wednesday’s parents’ presence at the school. Addams kids usually like torture, don’t they? Not a great deal is yet known about Joanna Lumley’s new character Grandmama, aka Hester Frump, seen here looking just as glamorously tailored and put together as her daughter (in the long and varied history of the Addams family cartoons and TV series, Grandmama has variously been Gomez and Morticia’s blood relative, which seems fitting for this messed-up Gothic family). Described as “Wednesday’s closest ally”, she’ll likely be providing the third kind of heat in the Wednesday/Morticia mother-daughter relationship central to the series. Even less is known about Steve Buscemi’s new school head, who was brought in to replace Gwendoline Christie’s sadly departed season one Principal Weems. Buscemi told Netflix “Barry Dort is a bit of a mysterious figure. Something about him is not right, but he loves the school and he has real outcast pride.” There’s no sign as yet of Lady Gaga’s previously announced guest turn in the series, nor any indication as to which character she’ll be playing. A new teacher, or parent, or – as many fans are crossing their fingers and hoping for – another addition to the Addams family in the form of Morticia’s upbeat blonde sister Ophelia, perhaps? Elsewhere, we see the returns of fan-favourite character Enid Sinclair (Emma Myers) with a new ‘do and a creepy doll lookalike complete with human hair, plus love interest Tyler (Hunter Doohan), frenemy Bianca (Joy Sunday), plus of course, Thing (Victor Dorobantu) – the disembodied hand/BFF no girl should be without. Wednesday season two part one streams on Netflix from August 6. Season two part two follows on September 3. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!

The first Apple Watch hit stores a decade ago on April 24, 2015. When mine arrived, I had no idea that putting on the Apple Watch would be the first step toward me becoming a half-marathon runner. At 24, fitness was never a part of my identity. Like most habits, it started with a streak. 2015: Starting from zero My only memory of running before the Apple Watch dates back to eighth grade in 2005 when I “completed” a mile run in gym class by walking with my friends for 20 minutes. The next known record of me attempting something called exercise occurred on May 9, 2015. I needed a screenshot of closing my rings for my Apple Watch review. Then I decided to do it again: stand up and move around for at least 12 different hours of the day, capture at least 30 minutes of exercise at a brisk walk or more, and burn my self-assigned goal of 500 active calories in a day. That was the start of a streak of closing my Activity rings with the original Apple Watch. This model would later colloquially be called Series 0 when Apple replaced it with two new models. 2016: Series 2 adds standalone GPS Apple Watch Series 1 introduced a new chip for a better overall experience. Apple Watch Series 2 brought the same speed boost and included the first built-in GPS. I started my ring-closing streak by going on daily outdoor walks with the original Apple Watch. Bringing the iPhone was required to map outdoor workouts for better accuracy using assisted GPS (i.e. the phone’s GPS). Summer brought heat and humidity, so I bought a used elliptical for the house to keep my workout streak alive without melting outside. Reviewing Apple Watch Series 2 for 9to5Mac, however, meant logging outdoor workouts without my iPhone. This was the only way to show that the Series 2 could map outdoor workouts without bringing the phone along for the walk, run, or bike ride. Apple heavily marketed the Series 2 for runners because of its GPS. Naturally, I decided to test it out by running. The only problem? I couldn’t run — like, at all. Fortunately, the cardio work I started with the original watch and the ellipitical helped me ease into running without keeling over or giving up. I wanted to close my rings as early in the day as possible, and it wasn’t exactly cool outside yet either. I started by running for as long as I could (a few seconds), then walking until I caught my breath (several minutes). After a few weeks, I could comfortably run a mile without stopping. I was finally using the Apple Watch Series 2 the way it was marketed, and I fell in love with running along the way. 2017: Series 3 brings LTE Listening to music while running has always been the secret to me finding joy in the first mile. After that, the endorphins activate and I don’t want to immediately stop to quiet my breathing. In 2016 and most of 2017, playing music while running outside without the iPhone required syncing media to the watch ahead of time and using Bluetooth headphones. I started with a cheap pair of so-called wireless earbuds that had a wire connecting either side, and I only paired them with the watch. Then AirPods were invented! The term “truly wireless” was required for a while to distinguish between wireless with a wire and wireless without. AirPods were also nice because they paired to your Apple Watch automatically just by setting them up from your iPhone. Playing music while working out got much better when the Apple Watch Series 3 added standalone cellular connectivity. This unlocked the ability to go for a run and stream music with just the Apple Watch and AirPods without strapping an iPhone to your arm. Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE, Apple Music streaming, and AirPods worked together to make an overall better running experience. Exercise went from something I did once to make a screenshot for a review to something that brought me great joy. It created a space for me to enjoy music, think without interruption, and set goals to reach and exceed. I logged my first workout with the first Apple Watch. I ran my first mile with Apple Watch Series 2. Then I ran my first 5K, 10K, and half marathon with Apple Watch Series 3. Apple Watch Series 4 introduced a larger display, and Apple Watch Series 5 introduced an always-on display. Testing accuracy and battery life in different scenarios while running races made evaluating those versions especially fun. Between 2015 and 2019, I went from never thinking about fitness to completing a total of seven different half-marathon races. Now my identity will always include being a runner. While the Apple Watch doesn’t make you a runner — going for a run makes you a runner — I can’t imagine another scenario where I would have had the same fitness journey. Do more with your iPhone Follow Zac Hall: X | Threads | Instagram | Mastodon Add 9to5Mac to your Google News feed.  FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

We were losing the light, and still about 20 kilometers from the main road, when The grove grew as if indifferent to certain unspoken rules of botany. There was no understory, no foreground or background, only the trees themselves, which grew as a wall of bare trunks that rose 100 feet or so before concluding with a burst of thick foliage near the top. The rows of trees ran perhaps the length of a New York City block and fell away abruptly on either side into untidy fields of dirt and grass. The vista recalled the husk of a failed condo development, its first apartments marooned when the builders ran out of cash. Standing there against the setting sun, the trees were, in their odd way, also rather stunning. I had no service out here—we had just left a remote nature preserve in southwestern Brazil—but I reached for my phone anyway, for a picture. The concern on the face of my travel partner, Clariana Vilela Borzone, a geographer and translator who grew up nearby, flicked to amusement. My camera roll was already full of eucalyptus. The trees sprouted from every hillside, along every road, and more always seemed to be coming. Across the dirt path where we were stopped, another pasture had been cleared for planting. The sparse bushes and trees that had once shaded cattle in the fields had been toppled and piled up, as if in a Pleistocene gravesite.  Borzone’s friends and neighbors were divided on the aesthetics of these groves. Some liked the order and eternal verdancy they brought to their slice of the Cerrado, a large botanical region that arcs diagonally across Brazil’s midsection. Its native savanna landscape was largely gnarled, low-slung, and, for much of the year, rather brown. And since most of that flora had been cleared decades ago for cattle pasture, it was browner and flatter still. Now that land was becoming trees. It was becoming beautiful.  Some locals say they like the order and eternal verdancy of the eucalyptus, which often stand in stark contrast to the Cerrado’s native savanna landscape.PABLO ALBARENGA Others considered this beauty a mirage. “Green deserts,” they called the groves, suggesting bounty from afar but holding only dirt and silence within. These were not actually forests teeming with animals and undergrowth, they charged, but at best tinder for a future megafire in a land parched, in part, by their vigorous growth. This was in fact a common complaint across Latin America: in Chile, the planted rows of eucalyptus were called the “green soldiers.” It was easy to imagine getting lost in the timber, a funhouse mirror of trunks as far as the eye could see. The timber companies that planted these trees push back on these criticisms as caricatures of a genus that’s demonized all over the world. They point to their sustainable forestry certifications and their handsome spending on fire suppression, and to the microphones they’ve placed that record cacophonies of birds and prove the groves are anything but barren. Whether people like the look of these trees or not, they are meeting a human need, filling an insatiable demand for paper and pulp products all over the world. Much of the material for the world’s toilet and tissue paper is grown in Brazil, and that, they argue, is a good thing: Grow fast and furious here, as responsibly as possible, to save many more trees elsewhere.  But I was in this region for a different reason: Apple. And also Microsoft and Meta and TSMC, and many smaller technology firms too. I was here because On a practical level, the answer seemed straightforward. Nobody disputed how swiftly or reliably eucalyptus could grow in the tropics. This knowledge was the product of decades of scientific study and tabulations of biomass for wood or paper. Each tree was roughly 47% carbon, which meant that many tons of it could be stored within every planted hectare. This could be observed taking place in real time, in the trees by the road. Come back and look at these young trees tomorrow, and you’d see it: fresh millimeters of carbon, chains of cellulose set into lignin.  At the same time, Apple and the others were also investing in an industry, and a tree, with a long and controversial history in this part of Brazil and elsewhere. They were exerting their wealth and technological oversight to try to make timber operations more sustainable, more supportive of native flora, and less water intensive. Still, that was a hard sell to some here, where hundreds of thousands of hectares of pasture are already in line for planting; more trees were a bleak prospect in a land increasingly racked by drought and fire. Critics called the entire exercise an excuse to plant even more trees for profit.  Borzone and I did not plan to stay and watch the eucalyptus grow. Garden or forest or desert, ally or antagonist—it did not matter much with the emerging stars of the Southern Cross and our gas tank empty. We gathered our things from our car and set off down the dirt road through the trees. A big promise My journey into the Cerrado had begun months earlier, in the fall of 2023, when the actress Octavia Spencer appeared as Mother Nature in an ad alongside Apple CEO Tim Cook. In 2020, the company had set a goal to go “net zero” by the end of the decade, at which point all of its products—laptops, CPUs, phones, earbuds—would be produced without increasing the level of carbon in the atmosphere. “Who wants to disappoint me first?” Mother Nature asked with a sly smile. It was a third of the way to 2030—a date embraced by many corporations aiming to stay in line with the UN’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 °C over preindustrial levels—and where was the progress? Apple CEO Tim Cook stares down Octavia Spencer as “Mother Nature” in their ad spot touting the company’s claims for carbon neutrality.APPLE VIA YOUTUBE Cook was glad to inform her of the good news: The new Apple Watch was leading the way. A limited supply of the devices were already carbon neutral, thanks to things like recycled materials and parts that were specially sent by ship—not flown—from one factory to another. These special watches were labeled with a green leaf on Apple’s iconically soft, white boxes. Critics were quick to point out that declaring an individual product “carbon neutral” while the company was still polluting had the whiff of an early victory lap, achieved with some convenient accounting. But the work on the watch spoke to the company’s grand ambitions. Apple claimed that changes like procuring renewable power and using recycled materials had enabled it to cut emissions 75% since 2015. “We’re always prioritizing reductions; they’ve got to come first,” Chris Busch, Apple’s director of environmental initiatives, told me soon after the launch.  The company also acknowledged that it could not find reductions to balance all its emissions. But it was trying something new.  Since the 1990s, companies have purchased carbon credits based largely on avoiding emissions. Take some patch of forest that was destined for destruction and protect it; the stored carbon that wasn’t lost is turned into credits. But as the carbon market expanded, so did suspicion of carbon math—in some cases, because of fraud or bad science, but also because efforts to contain deforestation are often frustrated, with destruction avoided in one place simply happening someplace else. Corporations that once counted on carbon credits for “avoided” emissions can no longer trust them. (Many consumers feel they can’t either, with some even suing Apple over the ways it used past carbon projects to make its claims about the Apple Watch.) But that demand to cancel out carbon dioxide hasn’t gone anywhere—if anything, as AI-driven emissions knock some companies off track from reaching their carbon targets (and raise questions about the techniques used to claim emissions reductions), the need is growing. For Apple, even under the rosiest assumptions about how much it will continue to pollute, the gap is significant: In 2024, the company reported offsetting 700,000 metric tons of CO2, but the number it will need to hit in 2030 to meet its goals is 9.6 million.  So the new move is to invest in carbon “removal” rather than avoidance. The idea implies a more solid achievement: taking carbon molecules out of the atmosphere. There are many ways to attempt that, from trying to change the pH of the oceans so that they absorb more of the molecules to building machines that suck carbon straight out of the air. But these are long-term fixes. None of these technologies work at the scale and price that would help Apple and others meet their shorter-term targets. For that, trees have emerged again as the answer. This time the idea is to plant new ones instead of protecting old ones.  To expand those efforts in a way that would make a meaningful dent in emissions, Apple determined, it would also need to make carbon removal profitable. A big part of this effort would be driven by the Restore Fund, a $200 million partnership with Goldman Sachs and Conservation International, a US environmental nonprofit, Profits would come from responsibly turning trees into products, Goldman’s head of sustainability explained when the fund was announced in 2021. But it was also an opportunity for Apple, and future investors, to “almost look at, touch, and feel their carbon,” he said—a concreteness that carbon credits had previously failed to offer. “The aim is to generate real, measurable carbon benefits, but to do that alongside financial returns,” Busch told me. It was intended as a flywheel of sorts: more investors, more planting, more carbon—an approach to climate action that looked to abundance rather than sacrifice. UNSPLASH APPLE Apple markets its watch as a carbon-neutral product, based in part on the use of carbon credits. The announcement of the carbon-neutral Apple Watch was the occasion to promote the Restore Fund’s three initial investments, which included a native forestry project as well as eucalyptus farms in Paraguay and Brazil. The Brazilian timber plans were by far the largest in scale, and were managed by BTG Pactual, Latin America’s largest investment bank.  Busch connected me with Mark Using eucalyptus for carbon removal also offered a new opportunity. Wishnie was overseeing a planned $1 billion initiative that was set to transform BTG’s timber portfolio; it aimed at a 50-50 split between timber and native restoration on old pastureland, with an emphasis on connecting habitats along rivers and streams. As a “high quality” project, it was meant to do better than business as usual. The conservation areas would exceed the legal requirements for native preservation in Brazil, which range from 20% to 35% in the Cerrado. In a part of Brazil that historically gets little conservation attention, it would potentially represent the largest effort yet to actually bring back the native landscape.  When BTG approached Conservation International with the 50% figure, the organization thought it was “too good to be true,” Miguel Calmon, the senior director of the nonprofit’s Brazilian programs, told me. With the restoration work paid for by the green financing and the sale of carbon credits, scale and longevity could be achieved. “Some folks may do this, but they never do this as part of the business,” he said. “It comes from not a corporate responsibility. It’s about, really, the business that you can optimize.” So far, BTG has raised $630 million for the initiative and earmarked 270,000 hectares, an area more than double the city of Los Angeles. The first farm in the plan, located on a 24,000-hectare cattle ranch, was called Project Alpha. The location, Wishnie said, was confidential.  “We talk about restoration as if it’s a thing that happens,” Mark Wishnie said, promoting BTG’s plans to intermingle new farms alongside native preserves.COURTESY OF BTG But a property of that size sticks out, even in a land of large farms. It didn’t take very much digging into municipal land records in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul, where many of the company’s Cerrado holdings are located, to turn up a recently sold farm that matched the size. It was called Fazenda Engano, or “Deception Farm”—hence the rebrand. The land was registered to an LLC with links to holding companies for other BTG eucalyptus plantations located in a neighboring region that locals had taken to calling the Cellulose Valley for its fast-expanding tree farms and pulp factories.   The area was largely seen as a land of opportunity, even as some locals had raised the alarm over concerns that the land couldn’t handle the trees. They had allies in prominent ecologists who have long questioned the wisdom of tree-planting in the Cerrado—and increasingly spar with other conservationists who see great potential in turning pasture into forest. The fight has only gotten more heated as more investors hunt for new climate solutions.  Still, where Apple goes, others often follow. And when it comes to sustainability, other companies look to it as a leader. I wasn’t sure if I could visit Project Alpha and see whether Apple and its partners had really found a better way to plant, but I started making plans to go to the Cerrado anyway, to see the forests behind those little green leaves on the box.  Complex calculations In 2015, a study by Thomas Crowther, an ecologist then at ETH Zürich, attempted a census of global tree cover, finding more than 3 trillion trees in all. A useful number, surprisingly hard to divine, like counting insects or bacteria.  A follow-up study a few years later proved more controversial: Earth’s surface held space for at least 1 trillion more trees. That represented a chance to store 200 metric gigatons, or about 25%, of atmospheric carbon once they matured. (The paper was later corrected in multiple ways, including an acknowledgment that the carbon storage potential could be about one-third less.) The study became a media sensation, soon followed by a fleet of tree-planting initiatives with “trillion” in the name—most prominently through a World Economic Forum effort launched by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at Davos, which President Donald Trump pledged to support during his first term.  But for as long as tree planting has been heralded as a good deed—from Johnny Appleseed to programs that promise a tree for every shoe or laptop purchased—the act has also been chased closely by a follow-up question: How many of those trees survive? Consider Trump’s most notable planting, which placed an oak on the White House grounds in 2018. It died just over a year later.  During President Donald Trump’s first term, he and French President Emmanuel Macron planted an oak on the South Lawn of the White House.CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES To critics, including Bill Gates, the efforts were symbolic of short-term thinking at the expense of deeper efforts to cut or remove carbon. (Gates’s spat with Benioff descended to name-calling in the New York Times. “Are we the science people or are we the idiots?” he asked.) The lifespan of a tree, after all, is brief—a pit stop—compared with the thousand-year carbon cycle, so its progeny must carry the torch to meaningfully cancel out emissions. Most don’t last that long.  “The number of trees planted has become a kind of currency, but it’s meaningless,” Pedro Brancalion, a professor of tropical forestry at the University of São Paulo, told me. He had nothing against the trees, which the world could, in general, use a lot more of. But to him, a lot of efforts were riding more on “good vibes” than on careful strategy.  Soon after arriving in São Paulo last summer, I drove some 150 miles into the hills outside the city to see the outdoor lab Brancalion has filled with experiments on how to plant trees better: trees given too many nutrients or too little; saplings monitored with wires and tubes like ICU admits, or skirted with tarps that snatch away rainwater. At the center of one of Brancalion’s plots stands a tower topped with a whirling station, the size of a hobby drone, monitoring carbon going in and out of the air (and, therefore, the nearby vegetation)—a molecular tango known as flux.  Brancalion works part-time for a carbon-focused restoration company, Re:Green, which had recently sold 3 million carbon credits to Microsoft and was raising a mix of native trees in parts of the Amazon and the Atlantic Forest. While most of the trees in his lab were native ones too, like jacaranda and brazilwood, he also studies eucalyptus. The lab in fact sat on a former eucalyptus farm; in the heart of his fields, a grove of 80-year-old trees dripped bark like molting reptiles.  To Pedro Brancalion, a lot of tree-planting efforts were riding more on “good vibes” than on careful strategy. He experiments with new ways to grow eucalyptus interspersed with native species.PABLO ALBARENGA Eucalyptus planting swelled dramatically under Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1960s. The goal was self-sufficiency—a nation’s worth of timber and charcoal, quickly—and the expansion was fraught. Many opinions of the tree were forged in a spate of dubious land seizures followed by clearing of the existing vegetation—disputes that, in some places, linger to this day. Still, that campaign is also said to have done just as Wishnie described, easing the demand that would have been put on regions like the Amazon as Rio and São Paulo were built.  The new trees also laid the foundation for Brazil to become a global hub for engineered forestry; it’s currently home to about a third of the world’s farmed eucalyptus. Today’s saplings are the products of decades of tinkering with clonal breeding, growing quick and straight, resistant to pestilence and drought, with exacting growth curves that chart biomass over time: Seven years to maturity is standard for pulp. Trees planted today grow more than three times as fast as their ancestors.