Biodiversity Conference: USAID Shows How Its Initiatives Have Been Helping to Protect the Amazon
October/November, 2024 – The Amazon was at the heart of global discussions during COP16, the United Nations Biodiversity Conference held in Cali, Colombia. USAID and its partners, including the private sector, used the opportunity to show how some initiatives developed in Brazil have contributed to conserving the standing forest, maintaining ecosystem services, and improving local quality of life.
The event was named Impact Investment Models and Partnerships for Biodiversity Conservation in the Amazon and Beyond. It was promoted by the Alliance of Bioversity & CIAT and the Partnership Platform for the Amazon (PPA), and focused on strategic partnerships that are driving sustainability in the most biodiverse forest in the world.
These include the investment model adopted by the Amazon Biodiversity Fund (ABF), a private fund that aims to invest in projects and businesses with social and environmental impact in the Legal Amazon; and Terrabio, a monitoring, reporting, and verification approach that integrates cutting-edge technologies in the analysis of geospatial data with environmental DNA to assess various land-use and investment models in terms of their relative impacts on biodiversity. Both are supported by USAID.
“Gone are the days when you had a project, and we wrote a little bit of a grant and someone comes and gets our money and they do a project and they report back the results and we hope at the end, it all adds up enough to make a big impact. We have to blow open the model, we have to do things like this. Private sector has to be at the core but they have to learn as well and they need us as much as we need them. Together, this is the way to go forward: working together, while also including local communities and people, whose ingenuity and experience are essential we need to make this happen,” said Mark Carrato, USAID Director in Brazil, at the opening session, when he gave an overview of the work that has been developed in the Amazon.
For Carrato, it is essential to ensure that communities are part of this vision for the future of the Amazon, and that there is market potential linked to these peoples’ voices, including Indigenous and riverine communities, and that they have opportunities for success.
The discussions were conducted by Bernardo Caldas de Oliveira, Head of Research at the Alliance of Bioversity & CIAT, and Eduardo Rocha, Head of Engagement at the PPA. Other participants included Wendy Francesconi, senior scientist for Multifunctional Landscapes at the Alliance, and partners from the Arapyaú Institute, Impact Earth, Michelin, and WWF.
Rocha delivered a presentation on part of the PPA portfolio, reinforcing the platform's goal to catalyze sustainable development models in the Amazon, leveraging positive impact investments, sharing good practices, and fostering multisectoral partnerships. He shared information about projects developed in partnership with private sector partners and cited a publication named Mapping Pathways to the Amazon, which brought together different initiatives, exploring differences, types of support, and levels of investment focused on the Amazon.
In his presentation, Francesconi explained how Terrabio works. She described how this monitoring, reporting, and verification approach has been developed, aiming to generate evidence on the environmental impacts of the businesses financed by the ABF. The fund was also described to panelists during a guest appearance by Nick Oakes, co-founder of Impact Earth and manager of the ABF.