Nature-Based Solutions
Amazon uses nature-based solutions to mitigate carbon emissions outside of our value chain and supplement the carbon-reduction efforts we’re driving across our operations. We also invest in conservation and restoration initiatives to protect the natural world, improve wildlife habitats, and promote biodiversity.
We follow scientific research to fund initiatives that are critical to hitting the targets of the Paris Agreement and staving off the most catastrophic effects of climate change.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made clear that carbon emissions from several industries will not be fully reduced by 2050. Even with aggressive decarbonization efforts, many companies will need to neutralize some emissions that cannot be eliminated to achieve net-zero carbon.
Carbon neutralization represents an opportunity for the world to help reduce emissions and stabilize the changing climate, while helping to preserve the natural world. Our nature-based carbon removal actions are focused on halting tropical rainforest loss, restoring degraded land, and scaling technologies that capture carbon emissions.
Tropical deforestation contributes approximately one-fifth of global emissions, according to the IPCC.
In 2021, Amazon helped create the Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest finance (LEAF) Coalition, a public-private project which has mobilized over $1 billion in corporate and government finance to protect tropical rainforests around the world.
The LEAF Coalition is designed to accelerate climate action by providing financing to help countries protect their tropical rainforests.
In November 2021, the Coalition signed Letters of Intent with five tropical forest countries: Ecuador, Costa Rica, Ghana, Vietnam, and Nepal. In 2022, during COP27, four Brazilian states signed Letters of Intent to participate in the Coalition, bringing participating tropical forest jurisdictions to nine.
In 2023, Amazon launched new partnerships to help smallholder farmers in the Brazilian state of Pará and the Peruvian Amazon restore degraded land with diverse agroforestry systems. These partnerships build on the Agroforestry and Restoration Accelerator in Brazil, which Amazon launched with The Nature Conservancy in 2021. These projects will restore degraded land to naturally trap and store carbon and mitigate climate change, while creating a more-sustainable source of income for thousands of local farmers from commodities such as cocoa and citrus.
To ensure the carbon benefits from these projects are robustly accounted for, Amazon is advancing new measurement approaches through the ABACUS standard—a rigorous set of principles and requirements to quantify the climate impacts of forest restoration projects. Project developers and investors developing new restoration projects that meet the ABACUS requirements are encouraged to respond to Amazon’s Request for Information.
In 2019, Amazon created the Right Now Climate Fund, a $100 million fund for nature-based solutions to restore and conserve forests, wetlands, and grasslands around the world. Through it, we’re financing community-focused projects to mitigate the impacts of climate change, enhance biodiversity, and add green space to urban areas.
