Amazon Biodiversity Fund, which is managed by Impact Earth, is a new Brazil-based investment fund dedicated to financing sustainable businesses in Brazil’s Amazon region that both create jobs and preserve standing forest. 

ABF pursues early stage and venture investments in enterprises that focus on the more than 700,000 smallholder farmers and their families in the region. It encourages the sustainable production of crops other than timber, including coffee, cocoa, and other indigenous local plants. Through this Nature-Based Solutions approach it aims to grow and strengthen companies that are both keeping the trees standing and creating local jobs. 

SEDF’s co-investors in ABF are the Brazilian Development Bank, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, L’Oreal Fund for Nature Regeneration, and ASN Bank. ABF is backed by a $100 million guarantee from the United States Development Finance Corporation.

Deforestation and forest degradation accounts for 12 to 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Close to 20 percent of the Amazon rainforest has already been cut down, risking an ecosystem tipping point in the largest forest-based cooling mechanism on the planet. The previous Bolsonaro administration had a political and economic development strategy linking deforestation to improved outcomes for the 29 million local and indigenous people of Amazonia. The election in 2023 of President Lula da Silva has led to a renewal of the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon, including a pledge to achieve net zero deforestation. A core tenet of that plan is the need to ensure new forms of economic growth and livelihoods for Brazil’s Amazon-based population to reduce incentives to cut down the forest. 

• avoidance of >4 million tons of atmospheric CO2 
• preservation of >250,000 hectares of at-risk forest 
• reforestation of 10,000 hectares of previously felled land 
• creation of >1,000 sustainable jobs, benefitting 3,000 households including Indigenous populations

This investment was developed together with Open Society’s Latin America team as part of a strategy that melds together climate impact with sustainable development and livelihood goals.