Brazil has been an important partner for the Global Environment Facility for decades. Indeed, the GEF is practically a Carioca—a native of Rio de Janeiro City. The GEF was founded on the eve of the Earth Summit held in Rio in 1992 and Brazil has been a close partner and collaborator ever since. Projects across Brazil’s diverse ecosystems helped shape the GEF as it evolved from a small pilot program to a multilateral fund seeking to catalyze transformational changes in the behavior of people, governments, and businesses.
The GEF has invested more than $1.2 billion in Brazil in 133 projects over the past 30 years and helped generate an additional $5 billion in co-financing. In that time, the GEF has employed a range of strategies, from focusing on specific areas such as biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation and adaptation, sustainable land management, sustainable cities, and coastal, marine, and international waters, to broad, cross-sectoral projects that seek to address the root causes of environmental and development challenges.
The challenges facing Brazil are in many ways a microcosm of the challenges facing the planet as a whole. Together with the GEF, Brazil is well-placed to demonstrate the enormous potential of a transition to a nature-positive economy, to tackle the drivers of environmental destruction, and to advance transformative change across our food, land use, energy, urban, and other key human systems that shape the planet.
Click here for information on the 64th GEF Council meeting, which will take place in Brasilia June 26-29, 2023.