UNESCO charts a new path for people and nature

But Itaipu is not just a conservation zone. It is a restoration story. Centuries of agricultural expansion reduced South America's Atlantic Forest to fragments. The protected areas managed by ITAIPU Binacional, the hydroelectric company that jointly runs the reserve, now contain the largest surviving patch of the Upper Paraná Atlantic Forest left in Paraguay, stretching 1,524 kilometres to form an unbroken wildlife corridor across the country.

The Itaipu Preserva Project has gone further still, actively rebuilding what was lost. At almost 3,000 hectares, it is Paraguay's largest native forest restoration initiative.  Four million trees have been planted across around 100 native and fruit-bearing species, many of them threatened. The seedlings come largely from ITAIPU Binacional's own nursery, the largest of its kind in the region, producing 1.2 million native plants a year and supplying Indigenous communities and environmental education programmes across the country.