By Felipe Arenas Gallo
Inside the air-conditioned halls of SP Hall, blocks away from the financial district of the Avenida Faria Lima, the talk is of momentum and mobilised billions towards deployment of Nature-based Solutions (NbS). The energy is one of contrasts. Less than a year ago, many of those present at Brazil Climate Investment Week (BCIW) 2026 were in Belém, where the COP30 Mutirão decision left day-to-day climate finance practitioners disappointed with the lack of decisive action coming from multi-lateral climate negotiations. However, it feels as if the private and financial sectors in Brazil have started to take matters into their own hands, and develop the frameworks that will bring transformational change in how climate capital is deployed across a very complex country.
One of the quotes I came away with, from the director of a local climate fund, is that despite how relevant climate change is in the context of Brazil, “projects and capital are not speaking the same language”. This strikes a chord: our comfortable context in the financial capital of Brazil seems very distant from that of developers trying to restore degraded land in the Amazon basin. Indeed, it starts to become clear that to the extent that we manage to translate the language of projects and capital, we might just be able to scale successful blueprints from Brazil across the many critical biomes that we must invest in to meet global climate goals.
In countries such as Brazil, deployment of climate capital is rarely a problem of financial availability; it is largely a challenge of overcoming major financial and structural barriers. Momentum has been demonstrated through initiatives including the three EcoInvest auctions, BNDES Fundo Clima commitments, and BNDESPar’s private equity allocations. These have resulted in unprecedented capital figures: the third EcoInvest auction in January 2026 alone mobilised R$ 53 billion, while BNDESPar committed R$ 4.3 billion to climate transition private equity.
Yet, such disruptive and catalytic capital has had the effect of highlighting the stubborn operational barriers that must be overcome before money hits the ground. Despite highly attractive concessional rates, approved loans often stall in the administrative plumbing. For instance, developers like Mombak and Re.green faced major delays (up to 2 years), simply to secure the mandatory bank guarantee letters (fiança bancária) required by BNDES to unlock their Fundo Clima resources.
To bypass these individual collateral deadlocks, initiatives such as the Violet Guarantee Fund, which is structured to raise R$ 2 billion to provide a portfolio-wide guarantee pool that satisfies collateral requirements while lowering transactional friction, show the way forward for overcoming these structural challenges. The industry is continually showing that when physical, land-based collateral is absent, we must actively manufacture bankability rather than simply looking for it in existing projects. This involves an exercise in systemic orchestration: managing complex stakeholder relationships, coordinating policy alignment, and building programmatic architecture to turn ecological assets into a credit-ready reality from the ground up.
And while Brazil can cushion its ecological transition using the deep balance sheets of domestic institutions like BNDES, its equally hyper-biodiverse (yet smaller) neighbours across Latin America must climb a much steeper, more exposed financial hill. Regionally, barriers including FX risk, high transaction costs for individual NbS developments, and a lack of local capacity are stalling the deployment of available climate capital. Unlocking the regional pipeline requires bridging mechanisms that can export Brazil’s de-risking and equity structures across national borders. Multilateral channels, including multilateral climate funds such as the Green Climate Fund (GCF), as well as the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), are increasingly acting as these regional bridges.
A clear example of this is the GEF Latam Climate Solutions Fund IV (GEF Latam IV), which recently secured a USD 70 million equity commitment from the GCF. By targeting middle-market companies across Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, this private equity model demonstrates how structured blended finance can scale commercial agroforestry and sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) plants regionally. It proves that when de-risking mechanisms are standardised, international capital can flow smoothly into complex regional biomes. Unlocking the true ecological potential of Latin America ultimately requires doing away with the assumption that capital will deploy itself if we simply set up and capitalise the funds. At its core, the bottleneck is not a lack of finance, but a challenge of technical translation.
Designing the mechanisms that allow public and private resources to mix without leaking requires a highly specialised, quiet kind of engineering. In our own work at E Co., we observe this translation challenge daily. Bridging the maturity gap between international institutional rigour, such as the complex regulations of the GCF, and the boots-on-the-ground realities of local project developers is fundamentally an institutional design task. Our support on the finance and governance pillars of the Brazil 2050 Strategy, alongside the structural design of multiple GCF adaptation multi-country programmes in the most critical biomes of South America, represents this translation in action: moving past high-level policy declarations to construct the practical, bankable pathways that allow capital to flow into complex landscapes with certainty.
As Latin America prepares to scale its ecological transition, São Paulo’s experience holds up a mirror to a simple fact that we cannot wait for perfect, bi and tri-lingual projects to magically materialise on their own. The true infrastructure of the green transition is not simply the physical acts of planting saplings in degraded pasturelands, securing fragile estuarine mangroves, or designing the ecological buffers that shield the 40+ million urban residents in Amazonian cities from seasonal burning and catastrophic flooding, but the technical translation and structural project engineering that make them possible. The critical question for development finance institutions and private investors alike is no longer just how much capital to pledge, but whether they are willing to invest early in the bilingual architecture required to turn the region’s natural potential into a bankable, resilient reality.
