NATURA, VERT Securitizadora, and the Brazilian Biodiversity Fund (FUNBIO) have partnered to implement the Living Amazon Financing Mechanism. This initiative aims to strengthen organizations, businesses, and sociobiodiversity value chains across the Amazon and its territories. Living Amazon operates as a blended finance mechanism, integrating a lending instrument and a non-reimbursable investment fund under a unified governance structure.
The mechanism operates through two main instruments. The first is an agribusiness receivables certificate (CRA, the acronym in Portuguese) managed by VERT, one of the country’s leading securitization companies. This financial tool provides annual funding to cooperatives and associations engaged in sociobiodiversity activities in the Amazon. The credit primarily serves as working capital for annual harvests, enhancing operational efficiency and increasing productivity.
Natura participates as an investor and serves as an off-taker (committing to purchase harvests) and mitigating risks for other investors.
The second instrument is a non-reimbursable philanthropic fund, the Facilitator Fund (ECF or Enabling Conditions Facility), managed by FUNBIO. The ECF is designed to make strategic investments in capacity building for cooperatives and associations, conservation initiatives, and other efforts to strengthen sociobiodiversity value chains and the territories they support, with a special emphasis on empowering youth and women.
The defining feature of the Living Amazon Mechanism is the immediate involvement of a major buyer, Natura, which invests in the financial operation while sourcing products from sociobiodiversity. Over the next decade, Living Amazon aims to foster sustainable economic development across 16 territories, benefiting over 10,000 families in the region.
The Brazilian Amazon represents 28% of the world’s tropical forests, yet it contributes less than 1% to the USD 175 billion global market for forest-compatible products. To unlock its potential, the sociobiodiversity sector in Brazil needs improved productive capacity, technology, knowledge, infrastructure, and funding. The Living Amazon Financing Mechanism was designed to address these needs and strengthen the value chains of sociobiodiversity products in the region.
SDG
StatusIn Progress |
BiomeAmazon |