What is One Day for the Amazon?
It is an initiative that will bring together in a high-level event once a year in New York, the attention and participation of scientists, bankers, investors, philanthropists, and private sector players. It is intended to promote the effective acceleration of necessary financing for the sustainability of the Amazon Basin in light of climate disruption and various negative vectors rapidly affecting it.
Paired with a media component, it will operate as a recurrent forum to exchange state-of-the-art information and enhance coordination related to private sector action and creative financial instruments for impactful projects in the 8-country-wide Amazon Basin.
This live event will take place in New York, on August 25th, 2022.
One Day for the Amazon
Advisory Board Meeting
As a step leading to this event, Latin Trade held the first One Day for the Amazon Advisory Board meeting, on February 24. This online roundtable brought together some of the most prominent players in this conservation endeavor.
In essence, the Advisory Board prepared the mains topics to be explored and discussed on the live event on August 25th, 2022: how to make a potent and practical architecture to attract investors to the conservation of the Basin.
Please join us in New York City for this most needed discussion. See you there!
One Day for the Amazon Advisory Board Meeting
PARTICIPANTS
María Mercedes Barrera
Director, Fundación Sura
Juan Pablo Bonilla
Head Sustainability, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)
Juan Carlos Castilla-Rubio
Founder, SpaceTime Ventures
Daniel Contrucci
Director, Climate Ventures
Victoria Galeano
CEO, Prissma
Santiago Gutiérrez
Executive Editor, Latin Trade
Alex Heath
U.S. Head of Social Impact & Sustainability, Edelman
Carolina Itzaina
VP Business Development, Latin Trade
Mark Kenber
Managing Director, Orbitas
Miika Korja
The Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra
Ricardo Meléndez-Ortiz
CEO, PrisStrategic Advisor, Latin Tradesma
María del Pilar Pardo
CEO, Gestión Ambiental Estratégica
Marcelo Pasquini
VP Head of Sustainability, Bradesco
Gustavo Pimentel
Managing Director, Sitawi
Virgílio Viana
Director General, Fundação Amazônia Sustentável
Roberto Waack
President, Uma Concertação pela Amazônia
Issues on the Agenda
- Science:
- State of Amazon Basin: nearing tipping point for ecological collapse?
- determining the Amazon’s biological potential – liabilities and assets.
- review of human-led drivers and trends, and nature resilience.
- assessing regenerative possibilities
- State fo finance:
- benchmarking needs: what is the real amount of investment needed?
- factoring risk of climate change, water and biodiversity depletion into return of investment
- better understanding dependences of business on climate and biodiversity
- philanthropy investment and business agendas, complementary or sequential?
- Is blended finance critical in the Amazon Basin equation?
- carbon markets, quo vadis?
- innovative tools, approaches from the financing world
- Institutions:
- balanced command and control approaches
- providing critical public goods – beyond public state’s ability?
- determining KPI for business and government action
- The social and cultural agenda
- complementing through investment the role of the state on health, education, housing – a 21st century human development agenda for the Amazon
- unlock potential of people living and working in a standing forest
- enhancing human indigenous capabilities in the Basin through massive investment in STEM, business education.
Our take: why protect the Amazon Basin?
The Amazon Basin, home to 30 million inhabitants, including 1.5 million indigenous people, spans over eight countries, provides critical ecosystems services for the entire world and is essential for climate stability. However, in the last 12 years, it has been hit by 3 mega-droughts and 3 mega-floods of the probability of occurrence of less than 1 in 200 years. Traditionally a carbon sink, the latest research demonstrates that South-eastern Amazonia has now been reversed by deforestation into a net carbon emissions source.[1] WWF estimates that at the current rate of destruction, about 30% of the Amazon biome will have been devastated by 2030 and large extensions may become a dry savannah. Since 2000, rainfall has declined across 69% of the Amazon Forest. Currently, host to almost 20% of the world’s known plants, The Earth BioGenome Project estimates that over 90% of its biota is yet to be discovered; the wealth of its genetic resources, once sequenced, is of utmost value to our future. Accelerating finance and creating new models of funding is a key and sine-qua-non component of ensuring the Amazon Basin’s sustainability.
[1] Gatti, L.V., Basso, L.S., Miller, J.B. et al. Amazonia as a carbon source linked to deforestation and climate change. Nature 595, 388–393 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03629-6
