Amazonia Impact Ventures
is an impact investor taking action to mitigate climate change and enhance biodiversity by protecting the Amazon rainforest and improving the lives of its people.
Creating real impact
We connect investors with impactful projects on the ground. We design and manage meaningful investments, diligently monitor progress and provide practical support to our investees. We mobilise private capital –and co-invest our own– in the stewards of the forest and impact-driven enterprises, delivering financial returns and real impact.
Our investments directly contribute to forest conservation, reducing deforestation, protecting biodiversity, restoring degraded lands and improving the livelihoods of people living in the Amazon. From London to Peruvian rainforest communities, from European speciality coffee buyers to ethical health food companies in the US West-Coast, we participate in every step of the impact investment value chain.
The Challenge
Climate change is undoubtedly the defining issue of our time, we are at a pivotal moment in history, and we have a moral responsibility to take action now. We only have a few years to lower our emission levels to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C.
Hundreds of thousands of hectares of the Amazon rainforest are cut down or burned every year, under pressure from illegal logging, mining and the expanding use of the land for unsustainable agriculture. If the current rate of deforestation continues, a tipping point will be reached by 2030 where a significant portion of the region is likely to change from rainforest to savannah.
The Amazon is estimated to contain the carbon equivalent of a decade's work of human emissions, up to 30% of all known biodiversity, 50% of all tropical forest and it produces 9% of the world's oxygen. Loss of the Amazon rainforest is removing one of the world’s largest carbon sinks, affecting the global climate stability and leading to staggering losses of biodiversity.
The Opportunity
The Amazon is one of humanity's greatest natural capital assets. It provides ecosystem services such as climate regulation, biodiversity generation, water and food production.
It works as an evolutionary laboratory and produces unique biodiverse foods which are already part of a multibillion dollar markets for sustainably-grown commodities as cacao, brazil nuts and açai as well as promising markets for other products with extraordinary nutritional properties. On the other side, so called nature-based or natural climate solutions such as conservation, restoration, and improved land management actions, increase carbon storage and avoid greenhouse gas emissions.
By investing in an inclusive biodiversity-based bio-economy, empowering SMEs and forest communities as agents of change, we can sustain the rainforest, restore degraded lands, improve forest people's livelihoods, make local communities thrive and mitigate
climate change.
Our Approach
We are driven by an urgency to take action. We use finance as a tool to produce a positive impact for nature, people and planet, and look for both impact and business opportunities in every investment.
We carefully select our investees and manage risk wisely, investing our own capital along with our investors'. We use impact-linked financial instruments to promote regenerative agricultural practices, deforestation-free commodities production, nature-based solutions to conserve and regenerate the Amazon Rainforest hand in hand with forest people, responsible companies and impact investors.
Amazonia Impact Ventures has been selected to the ImpactAssets 50 2023 as an Emerging Impact Manager.
The ImpactAssets 50™ (IA 50) is the first publicly available database that provides a gateway into the world of impact investing for donors and/or investors and their financial advisors, offering an easy way to identify experienced impact investment firms and explore the landscape of potential investment opportunities.