Biden Becomes First U.S. President to Visit the Brazilian Rain Forest for Historic International Climate Announcement
By Mona Austin
SUMMARY: President Joe Biden will become the first sitting U.S. President to visit a part of the Amazon Rain Forest in Brazil on Sunday to promote his climate agenda. Climate change is a global issue -- the knowledge of which the United States has influenced with scientific data input and the investment of financial resources throughout the Biden Administration, but the incoming Trump Administration is expected to approach climate in a more laissez-faire fashion. Today, Pres. Biden will punctuate his commitment to climate with the Amazon Rain Forest in Manua, Brazil as the backdrop. Nearly the size of Australia, the world's largest tropical forest and river system is the leading sources of the carbon dioxide supply and green house gas which has significantly dwindled due to deforestation.
The White House announced Sunday that the Biden Administration will invest $50 million to the Amazon Fund for continued preservation of the rain forest. The Biden Administration announced a $500 million commitment last year, joining the efforts of Norway the biggest financial supporter of the Amazon. In addition to taking an aerial tour of a portion of the rain forest, President Biden will visit a museum and sign a proclamation designating International Conservation Day.
Even as he prepares to depart office, Pres. Biden is sending a message that his leadership on climate issues extends beyond domestic impacts to the entire earth. From droughts to wildfires and devastating Hurricanes to harnessing natural resources, Biden has tackled the climate crisis at home and learned lessons about the deterioration of the earth that the world has taken notes on. "Climate change is an existential threat to humanity. Unchecked itis actually going to bake the planet. This is not hyperbole. It's real. And we have a moral obligation," the president once said.
Climate control and protecting the planet is a part of Bidens legacy that he will seal with today's visit.
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FACT SHEET: President Biden Marks Historic Climate Legacy with Trip to Brazil’s Amazon Rainforest
Since Day One of the Biden-Harris Administration, the fight against climate change has been a defining cause of President Biden’s leadership and presidency. These past four years, the Administration has created a bold new playbook that has turned tackling the climate crisis into an enormous economic opportunity – both at home and abroad. After spearheading the most significant domestic climate and conservation action in history and leading global efforts to tackle the climate crisis, today President Biden is traveling to Manaus, Brazil, where he will meet with Indigenous and other leaders and become the first sitting U.S. president to visit the Amazon rainforest.
The President has leveraged our Nation’s leadership on domestic climate and conservation action to help accelerate global efforts to combat and reverse deforestation and deploy nature-based solutions that reduce emissions, enhance biodiversity, and build resilience to a changing climate. As part of advancing this ambitious climate and conservation agenda, the Administration is investing in Amazon conservation efforts, sustainable land management, and wildfire prevention, while also strengthening our Nation’s collaboration with Brazil, support for Indigenous communities, and efforts to combat illegal deforestation in the Amazon and around the world.
Today, as part of his historic trip to the Amazon, President Biden will announce that the United States has fulfilled his historic pledge to increase U.S. international climate finance to over $11 billion a year by 2024 – making the United States the largest bilateral provider of climate finance in the world. This represents a more than six-fold increase from the $1.5 billion in climate finance the U.S. provided in FY21, underscoring the success of President Biden’s whole-of-government effort to scaling-up U.S. climate finance over the last four years. This also includes achieving for the second year in a row his pledge to scale-up U.S. adaptation finance six-fold to over $3 billion per year to help vulnerable countries around the world build resilience to the impacts of climate change, as part of implementing the President’s Emergency Plan for Adaptation and Resilience (PREPARE). This also included achieving record-levels of climate investments through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and U.S. Export Import Bank (EXIM) – with DFC reaching $3.71 billion in FY24 and EXIM increasing its investments to a record $1.6 billion in FY24. President Biden will also sign a U.S. proclamation designating November 17th as International Conservation Day. The proclamation recognizes that conservation is critical to protecting the livelihoods of the people who depend on our world’s natural wonders, conserving our ecosystems and wildlife, ensuring our lands and waters can be enjoyed for generations to come, and helping avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
Central to today’s trip is President Biden’s commitment to conserving our forests and combatting global deforestation. Over the past four years, the Administration has led efforts to conserve more than 45 million acres of lands and waters; safeguard mature and old-growth forests on Federal lands here at home; strengthen reforestation partnerships across the country to support local economies; combat global deforestation; and deploy nature-based solutions that reduce emissions, enhance biodiversity, and build resilience in the face of increasing climate threats. Today, the Biden-Harris Administration is announcing new efforts to accelerate global action to conserve lands and waters, protect biodiversity, and tackle the climate crisis, including: • Announcing $50 Million for the Amazon Fund. The United States is announcing $50 million for the Amazon Fund, which will bring U.S. total contributions to the Amazon Fund to $100 million, subject to Congressional notification. • Launching the Brazil Restoration & Bioeconomy Finance Coalition. The United States, BTG Pactual, and over 12 partners are announcing the launch of the Brazil Restoration and Bioeconomy Finance Coalition. This Coalition intends to mobilize at least $10 billion in public and private investment for land restoration and bioeconomy-related projects by 2030, supporting the conservation and restoration of at least 5.5 million hectares during this period, and contributing to 1.5 gigatons of emissions reductions and removals through 2050. At least $500 million is expected to be invested in projects that support Indigenous peoples and local communities in the Brazilian Amazon. • Announcing a New DFC Investment in the Largest Reforestation Projects in the Amazon. DFC is providing a $37.5 million loan to Mombak Gestora de Recursos Ltda., to support the large-scale planting of native tree species on degraded grasslands in Brazil, which will sequester carbon and enable biodiversity conservation. Mombak has designed an innovative and large-scale approach to generating high-quality “Verified Emission Reduction (VER)” credits by acquiring large tracts of degraded grassland in the Brazilian state of Pará and surrounding regions, which it will plant with native tree species. This activity is expected to sequester approximately 5 million metric tons of CO2 over 50 years while preserving biodiversity in the Amazon region. • Announcing Support for the Tropical Forest Forever Facility. The United States today announced its support for President Lula’s bold vision of creating the TFFF - a pathbreaking new $125 billion fund that reflects both the urgency and the scale of the challenge of conserving the world’s most important forests. TFFF will attract substantial private capital and make a meaningful contribution to tropical forest conservation. The United States is announcing support to help finalize the necessary technical and analytical work needed to design and setup the Facility.
These announcements supplement additional efforts the United States is taking to support climate resilience and biodiversity in critical ecosystems like the Amazon and others around the world, including: Scaling Finance to Restore and Conserve These Important Landscapes • Leveraging Demand for High-Integrity Forest Carbon Credits. The Lowering Emissions through Advancing Forest finance (LEAF) Coalition, co-founded by the United States as a coalition of private sector and government buyers, recently announced a $180 million agreement on high-integrity forest carbon credits with the Brazilian state of Pará. Revenues from the transaction of credits generated at the scale of the entire state, at the pathbreaking price of $15/tonne of avoided emissions, will support the conservation of the Amazon Rainforest. The agreement is LEAF's first deal in the Amazon. Next steps include full consultations with stakeholders, program validation and verification of results under the ART-TREES standard. Agreements with additional Amazon region states are expected in the coming months, starting with Acre, with significant demand-side interest for high-integrity credits from Brazilian states.
• New Cooperation Framework Agreement Between DFC and BNDES. Last month, DFC and Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (BNDES), the Brazilian Development Bank, signed a cooperation framework agreement to enhance and deepen co-investment opportunities in Brazil in climate-related sectors. This new partnership hopes to expand support for conservation and restoration investments at scale in the Amazon’s arch of reforestation and other important biodiversity-rich biomes.
• Launching a Nature-Based Solutions Investment Lab. Instituto Itausa, BB Asset, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and Instituto Clima e Sociedade are partnering with USAID to structure a nature-based solutions (NbS) Investment Lab with $2 million from USAID. The lab will foster an enabling environment to unlock private investment in NbS projects by creating interaction and collaboration among different sources of funds, sources of capital, and NbS stakeholders to create innovative financial instruments and transactions; identifying and designing appropriate business models, standardized projects and assessment of impacts of NbS projects in Brazil; and addressing regulatory challenges and advocate for policy enhancements.
• Launching Alliances for the Amazon. This initiative will build on an existing partnership with the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) that created a collective action platform to join private sector and civil society organizations to develop and identify innovative solutions for sustainable development and conservation of the Brazilian Amazon. In its prior phase with USAID support, the Partnership accelerated 123 biodiversity-supportive businesses, leveraged $7.5 million in private funding, and supported conservation of 39 million hectares. The new AFA partnership will expand USAID-CIAT’s ground-breaking TerraBio scientific methodology for measuring biodiversity impact for Amazon-based impact investment projects.
• USAID will Provide $2.6 Million to the Rainforest Wealth Project, led by IMAFLORA in collaboration with Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), which seeks to establish scalable economic models to conserve standing forests, meet legal requirements, enhance local community welfare, and achieve responsible market standards. The project aims to expand the Origens Brasil network to facilitate fair trade for community-produced goods, increasing corporate participation and commitment within the network. It also focuses on strengthening the value chains for non-timber forest products and promoting agroecology among family farmers, traditional communities, settlers, and quilombolas across northern and southeastern Pará, bringing them into the Origens Brasil network. Building the Bioeconomy
● Announcing $4 million to Support New Business Models that Keep Forests Standing While Benefitting Local Businesses and Families. USAID is announcing $4 million to support a program that it is codesigning with local organization Conexsus to strengthen the bioeconomy business ecosystems in the Brazilian Amazon, bolstering a new economic model that keeps the forest standing and aligns biodiversity conservation with economic growth for local businesses and families to thrive. This initiative builds on a Memorandum of Understanding signed last March between the Skoll Foundation and USAID that recognized their shared commitment to advance locally led development and expand coordination to address deforestation issues and promote gender equality globally.
● USAID is Investing $1.4 Million in Assobio: The Call for Socio-Biodiversity. This project will strengthen bioeconomy value chains that hold potential for forest and biodiversity conservation while increasing income generation and addressing food security in the state of Mato Grosso. The project’s aim is to strengthen a thriving forest-based economy by creating new public-private arrangements that attract financing and promoting diversified strategies to support regenerative land management, entrepreneurial knowledge, and access to financial resources and markets for family farming and Indigenous people in Mato Grosso’s Amazon region. This will significantly contribute to the conservation of approximately one-third of the forest in Mato Grosso, an area of 8.9 million hectares. Supporting Low-Carbon, Climate-Resilient Supply Chains
• USAID is Investing $2.8 Million in the Regenerative Agriculture for the Conservation of the Amazon (ARCA) Activity. The ARCA program promotes nature-based solutions and restoration in buffer zones around conservation units, Indigenous lands, quilombolas, and land reform settlements in seven territories in three of Brazil’s Amazonian states—Mato Grosso, Maranhão, and Pará, all of which are located in the Brazilian Amazon’s Arc of Deforestation. ARCA’s aim is to promote sustainable land use, biodiversity
conservation, and the socio-environmental resilience of traditional communities through capacity building, collaboration, and innovation. ARCA aims to help improve the management of more than 19 million hectares of land in the Amazon, working with 40 Indigenous Territories and Quilombola Areas.
• The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is Supporting Efforts to Improve Fertilizer Efficiency. USDA has partnered with Brazilian and U.S. institutions on a groundbreaking joint research project to improve fertilizer efficiency, with the goal of combatting climate change and food insecurity. The project, called “Fertilize for Life,” currently funded at $1.2 million is part of USDA’s Fertilize Right Initiative, launched in 2023 with support from the U.S. Department of State’s Global Fertilizer Challenge, and focuses on enabling cooperation on more efficient, climate-friendly land use has significant potential to scale sustainable agriculture, improve productivity and farmers’ livelihoods, while reducing nitrous oxide emissions.
• The Department of State, through a $2.5 million award to the Nature Conservancy (TNC), is supporting efforts to reduce deforestation associated with the Brazilian cattle sector by improving traceability of cattle throughout the entire supply chain. These interventions aim to support the cattle industry in avoiding 400 million metric tons of carbon emissions per year from deforestation and habitat loss, alongside reductions in methane emissions. This effort is anchored in the State of Para, which has set a goal of achieving full cattle traceability by 2025. Leveraging Technology to Support Forest Conservation and Management
• Partnering with the Government of Brazil to Combat Illegal Logging and Associated Trade. The U.S. is cooperating to ensure Brazil possesses state-of-the-art technology and operational capacity for timber identification via Mass Spectrometry (DART-TOFMS: Direct Analysis in Real Time Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry). This technology identifies a unique chemical "fingerprint" to identify wood species, strengthening capacity to monitor and enforce legality in timber supply chains.
• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is Supporting Near Real-Time Burn Area Mapping Efforts to the Remote Sensing Laboratory at Rio de Janeiro Federal University, providing key satellite observations used by Sistema Alarmes. The system generates daily burned area mapping updates for major endangered biomes in Brazil, helping inform decision making at the Brazilian Ministry for the Environment and Climate Change. For more than 15 years NOAA has also supported the satellite-based wildfire monitoring program at the Brazilian Institute for Space Research. That program provides critical near real-time fire detection information for most of South America using a suite of satellite datasets.
• USAID is Investing $7.8 million in its Longstanding Partnership with the U.S. Forest Service to Strengthen Brazilian Fire Management. USAID and the U.S. Forest Service
support Brazilian agencies with wildfire prevention and response. Standardized fire curricula ensure all firefighters share a common language and standardized approaches like the Incident Command System. USFS promotes inclusive fire management, training women and Indigenous communities, including the first-ever all-women Indigenous fire brigade in Tocantins and Maranhão. Delivering for Local and Indigenous Communities
• USAID is Investing $1.9 Million to Launch the Alliance of Indigenous Peoples for the Forests of the Eastern Amazon. This alliance will bring together organizations representing Indigenous people to conserve, protect, and restore natural resources in 14 Indigenous territories in Maranhão and Tocantins states. The project will cover a total combined area of approximately 2.5 million hectares of land that is home to a population of roughly 35,000 individuals from 11 ethnic groups, as well as a group in voluntary isolation.
• Expanding Support for Existing U.S. Programs Including the Indigenous Peoples Finance Access Facility (IPFAF). This project aims to increase access to financing for Indigenous communities for forest conservation, restoration, and management with a focus on Indigenous peoples in the Amazon basin, as well as the Congo Basin, and Southeast Asia. IPFAF is also working to enhance the capacity of Indigenous peoples and their representative organizations to protect and sustainably manage natural resources in 27 million hectares of forested landscapes of southern Amazonas state, and across savannah and forested landscapes of Roraima state.
• USAID Is Investing $4 Million to Launch the Tapajós for Life Activity, which aims to reduce threats to Amazon biodiversity by improving sustainable use and conservation of 7 million hectares of protected areas and Indigenous peoples’ lands and local communities' lands in the Tapajós river basin. It will expand the sustainable value chains for forest products, support community-based tourism, and improve territorial management within the river basin.
• USAID will Invest $1.4 Million to Launch the Well-Being and Territorial Management in the Rio Negro and Xingu River Basins Project. This activity seeks to strengthen the capacity of Indigenous peoples of the Xingu and Rio Negro River basins—and their networks of partnerships—to implement Brazil’s National Policy for the Territorial and Environmental Management of Indigenous Lands (PNGATI) and its management instruments, such as the Territorial and Environmental Management Plans. Strengthening the environmental management of these Indigenous territories in the Rio Negro and Xingu basins could help sustainably manage approximately 26 million hectares of land that are strategically important for the conservation of biodiversity in the Brazilian Amazon.
• USAID is investing $2.6 million to launch the Integrated Indigenous Territorial Management activity, which will support Indigenous representative organizations to develop territorial and environmental management plans that incorporate policy advocacy on Indigenous lands, enhancing the capacity of Indigenous peoples and their representative organizations to protect and sustainably manage natural resources in a total combined area of 27 million hectares in forested landscapes of southern Amazonas state, and across the savannah and forested landscapes of Roraima state. Leveraging U.S.-Brazil Science and Technology Partnerships
• Launching Zero Carbon Advanced Energy Systems in the Amazon. The U.S. Department of Energy will execute an assessment of renewable mini-grid deployment in the Legal Amazon region with the goal of supporting Brazil’s Energies of the Amazon Program. A flagship program for President Lula, Energies of the Amazon intends to decrease the region’s negative social and environmental impacts associated with reliance on fossil fuels. By supporting the deployment of reliable, clean power to vulnerable communities in the Amazon, this project will cotribute to faster social and economic development in the region.
• Advancing One Health Cooperation in Brazil and the Amazon Basin: The National Science Foundation and its partners will announce $17 million for Belmont Forum grants focused on climate, environment, and health cooperation. Of these, nearly $3 million in funding is for projects across Brazil and the Amazon Basin.
• Provided $1.4 Million to Reduce Organized Criminal Activity Related to Illegal Mining and Trafficking of Mercury. The U.S. is promoting the rule of law and economic development in the Brazilian Amazon. Illegal mining, often marked by its affiliation with organized crime groups, poses a significant threat to peace, stability, and the rule of law, as well as for the environment, ranging from illegal deforestation and water source contamination to air pollution and land degradation.
