Amazon announced that it is investing in a new initiative through the Right Now Climate Fund—the Agroforestry and Restoration Accelerator. Working in partnership with The Nature Conservancy, the Accelerator aims to restore degraded lands in ways that improve the livelihoods of local communities, while also removing carbon from the atmosphere.
The agroforestry and restoration initiative kicks off in the Brazilian state of Pará, home to 9% of the world’s tropical forest. Pará is part of the Amazon rainforest, and it's facing unprecedented deforestation rates—losing over 13.3 km2 of forest land every day over the last year. Amazon and The Nature Conservancy are working closely with communities to restore native rainforest through the Accelerator, while also opening up a more sustainable source of income for thousands of local farmers in Pará.
Removing carbon and leading through science
According to recent findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, nature-based solutions can play a critical role in avoiding the worst effects of climate change, as a complement to other measures to reduce carbon emissions from energy use. Amazon believes that nature-based solutions such as conservation, restoration, and improved land-management actions are a necessary supplement to own its efforts to decarbonize its business activities. Nature-based solutions increase carbon storage or reduce greenhouse gas emissions in forests, wetlands, grasslands, farmland, and marine environments. They can also provide additional benefits such as conserving wildlife habitats, protecting biodiversity, improving water quality, and reducing flood risk. All of these benefits also help to enhance well-being in local communities.
As part of its commitment to meet The Climate Pledge, Amazon is first and foremost continuing to innovate and invest in decarbonizing its businesses. The company has purchased 100,000 electric delivery vehicles, and is the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in the world. Amazon is also investing in nature-based solutions outside of its value chain through the Right Now Climate Fund, which supports the Accelerator and other nature-based carbon removal projects.
Additionally, through the recently announced LEAF Coalition—a public-private initiative to mobilize at least $1 billion to protect the world’s tropical forests—Amazon and other partners are working to curb tropical deforestation and reduce the amount of carbon emitted in the atmosphere.
Supporting local farmers and restoring forests
Our team is working closely with The Nature Conservancy and other local civil society organizations on the Accelerator by helping small-scale farmers restore degraded cattle pastures to native forest and agroforestry. The Accelerator also provides farmers with sustainable income through the sales of cocoa and other crops, and will support 3,000 farmers and restore approximately 20,000 hectares of land—a land mass approximately the size of Seattle—within three years. This initiative aims to remove up to 10 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere between now and 2050, equivalent to one year of emissions from 2 million cars on the road.
The Accelerator will also experiment with innovative ways to support farmers and nurture markets for sustainable forest-based commodities, including implementing new methodologies and satellite-based technologies for quantifying and monitoring carbon capture and removal. The goal of the Accelerator is to develop solutions that can rapidly scale from initial investment to millions of hectares of degraded pasture that have the potential for reforestation and agroforestry, which can improve livelihoods in local communities now and for future generations.
Learn more about this program and sustainability at Amazon.
