By Jake Spring and Simon Jessop
SAO PAULO (Reuters) – Brazil on Monday announced it would partner with the world’s biggest financial climate coalition to turbocharge funding for clean energy and efforts to restore nature, such as reforesting the Amazon rainforest.
Brazilian development bank BNDES will partner with the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) – a global coalition of asset managers, banks and insurance firms – to mobilize public and private financing.
The tie-up echoes some existing initiatives to help countries, such as a $20 billion program in Indonesia to phase out coal, although Brazil’s announcement does not come with the multi-billion dollar investment commitments.
BNDES President Aloizio Mercadante declined to give a value of the expected investment or a timeline for its launch, but told reporters that the government would act with “urgency.”
The announcement comes amid President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s bid over the next two years to take a central role in leading global climate efforts by hosting the Group of 20 largest economic powers this year and the United Nations COP30 climate summit in 2025.
GFANZ co-chair Mark Carney, a former Bank of England governor, likened the program to a “more comprehensive” version of the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) financing efforts to phase out coal in Vietnam, Indonesia and South Africa. JETP is backed by the United States and other wealthy nations with public and private financing, including multilateral development banks.
“This is just much more comprehensive across the whole economy as opposed to just energy and it’s moving forward as opposed to dealing with stranded assets,” Carney said on the sidelines of a green finance event in Sao Paulo.
Carney and Mercadante said the investment platform would be used to expand Brazil’s already vast renewable energy sector and projects like the “Arc of Reforestation” that aims to restore 60,000 square km (23,160 square miles) of degraded or destroyed Amazon rainforest.
(Reporting by Jake Spring in Sao Paulo and Simon Jessop in London; Editing by Brad Haynes and Sandra Maler)
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