The Brief

The Brief: Brazil’s plan to finance ‘tropical forests forever’ – some day

ImpactAlpha · November 6, 2025

Greetings Agents of Impact! Our monthly newsletter, ImpactAlpha Latin America, drops today. Opt-in to receive ImpactAlpha Latin America as part of your subscription. 

📞 Get PluggedIn: Blending and braiding capital to power the future of work. Join Taj Eldridge of Jobs for the Future and ImpactAlpha contributor Sherrell Dorsey for a special edition of PluggedIn on how bridge funding, blended finance and braided capital can be used to create good green jobs of the future. Eldridge and Dorsey will be joined by members of JFF’s Investor Network Capital Allocators Initiative, including Green Power Ventures’ Reginald Parker and Edward Jean-Louis of Monte’s Fam. Get PluggedIn, Monday, Nov. 10, at 10am PT /  1pm ET / 6pm London. RSVP today. 

☎️ Answer The Call: Catalyzing local growth funds for growth firms in Africa and Asia. Local fund managers offering flexible, fit-for-purpose capital for growth-oriented businesses represents an emerging asset class attractive to local pension funds and high-net worth individuals. The recent “State of play” report from the Collaborative for Frontier Finance provides insights from more than 100 local business growth funds and details ways to unlock domestic and institutional capital for small business finance. “The big challenge is how you move big capital to little deals,” says CFF’s Drew von Glahn, who will join Mirepa Investment Advisors Samuel Yeboah in Accra, Kenya Climate Ventures Victor Ndiege in Nairobi, and Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes of Aruwa Capital Management in Lagos, to discuss what’s working, what’s not, and how catalytic capital can do more. Join this special 90-minute Agents of Impact Call, Wednesday, Nov. 12, at 6am PT / 9am ET / 3pm Lagos / 5pm Nairobi. RSVP today.

💃🏽 Step up, step out – again. With Morgan Simon and Iya Lingua, we’re reprising our successful SOCAP happy hour with an encore performance for Bay Area locals. Join ImpactAlpha, Candide Group, Toniic, ImpactAssets and the SF Impact Crew for jazz, soul and informal networking, Sunday, Nov. 16, from 4-8pm PT at Cigar Bar (no smoking on Sundays), 850 Montgomery St. in San Francisco. Admission is free, but the event will sell out, so please RSVP here.  

In today’s Brief:

  • Steering bond proceeds to preserve tropical forests forever
  • Solar for supply chains in Mexico
  • Speeding the design of low-carbon buildings
  • The shifting landscape of blended finance

Featured: COP Watch

With Tropical Forests Forever fund, Brazil tries a new approach to slowing deforestation. The annual climate summit known as the Conference of the Parties is almost here. Every COP host puts its stamp on the proceedings. As the host of COP30, which will sprawl across Belém, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s focus is on nature, and tropical forests in particular. The South American country, home to the largest expanse of the Amazon, has championed a fund to protect tropical forests as part of its COP30 agenda. The Tropical Forests Forever Facility, or TFFF, would pay heavily forested nations — including Brazil — to prevent deforestation. Brazil is looking to raise $25 billion from governments to unlock another $100 billion from private investors. Under Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, deforestation rates have slowed. But forests around the world are still being rapidly deforested. Global finance directed to forests totaled about $84 billion in 2023, while the annual investment required to meet 2030 forest-goals is about $300 billion, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

  • Bond proceeds. If it reaches the $125 billion target, the TFFF would be the largest blended mechanism of its kind (see Signals, below) and generate up to $4 billion annually in conservation payments. The pooled funds would be invested in a diversified fixed-income portfolio of bonds from emerging markets and other sovereign and corporate debt, with the returns paid out annually to forest-rich nations that keep deforestation below 0.5% of total forested area. Countries meeting that benchmark would receive about $1.6 per acre of standing forest. Brazil made the first financial commitment last month, pledging $1 billion. Other countries have been slower to step up, and Brazil has downsized its fundraising goal to $10 billion by next year. Private investors including PIMCO, Bank of America and Barclays have signaled they would support the fund; China, Norway, France, Germany, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates have expressed interest in contributing (the UK, which participated in the facility’s design process, announced that it would not invest). At least 20% of the disbursements will go directly to Indigenous peoples and local communities, representing one of the largest global financial flows directed to such communities.

Dealflow: Energy Access

Mexico’s Solfium raises $10 million to bring solar to corporate suppliers. Mexico’s small businesses face rising electricity bills, but adoption of solar power has been hampered by market fragmentation, quality issues and lack of financing. “You have a high variability in the quality of the service and of the hardware offered, and as a result, some customers were happy, a lot of customers were not,” said Andrés Friedman of Mexico City-based Solfium. The company integrates financing, installation and performance monitoring to encourage greater solar adoption. Accion Ventures and ALIVE Ventures, Acumen’s Latin American investment group, led Solfium’s $10 million Series A round. The impact investors were drawn to the company for the “opportunity to access solar energy, but also access to credit,” ALIVE’s Lina Montoya told ImpactAlpha. Kamay Ventures also participated in the round. The company says it has installed more than 36,000 panels with a total of 25 megawatts of capacity since launching in 2021.

  • Corporate suppliers. Solfium’s growth strategy involves working with large corporations that are trying to decarbonize their value chains. Coca-Cola, for example, is partnering with Solfium to install solar power at corporate facilities as well as for its thousands of small retailers and suppliers. Solfium has similar arrangements with several large Mexican banks. The model delivers benefits on both sides of the equation, Friedman said. “If Coca-Cola helps a convenience store be more efficient and grow and sell more, that’s a commercial opportunity for Coca-Cola, right? When you’re helping your supplier, you’re reducing your operational cost.”
  • Keep reading. 

C.Scale raises $2 million to connect building designers with low-carbon product suppliers. C.Scale’s AI-based software helps architects, engineers and other building designers identify emission sources, recommends actions, and connects designers with makers of low-carbon products that meet their specs. “C.Scale is the connective tissue the building materials market has been missing,” said Paul Straub of Wireframe Ventures, which co-led C.Scale’s $2 million pre-seed round with Active Impact Investments. “Designers get faster access to better materials, manufacturers get qualified leads, and projects achieve meaningful carbon reduction.”

  • Low-carbon design. Since its founding last year, C.Scale’s platform has seen more than 1,200 project designs representing over 120 million square feet of construction. It has brought on corporate clients like Autodesk and Schneider Electric, which use C.Scale to market their low-carbon building products. C.Scale will be at COP30 in Brazil next week in the Buildings Pavillion, which will showcase climate solutions for buildings and construction.
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Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:

  • Singapore-based Ant International made a strategic investment in R2, which helps online marketplaces embed financing as one of their services to small businesses. (LAVCA)
  • Brazilian asset manager eB Capital spun out its decarbonization investment group, Flying Rivers Capital, which has one billion reais ($187 million) in assets under management. (NeoFeed)
  • Mexico-based edtech venture Ginia raised $1.7 million in a pre-seed round to help graduating students search for jobs and connect with employers. (LatamList)

Signals: Blended Finance

Institutional investors warm to blended climate finance even as foreign aid and catalytic capital decline. The theory of blended finance was simple, even if the transactions were not. Public and philanthropic capital would help develop projects and de-risk transactions in order to crowd in private institutional investors to finance climate action at scale. But just as institutional investors are arriving, public and catalytic capital is in retreat, according to Convergence’s latest “State of climate blended finance“ report. Blended finance transactions that combine public and private dollars for climate projects totaled $15.5 billion last year, below 2023’s $20.2 billion. The 23% drop is due to fewer “whales,” or mega-deals; there were just three billion-dollar-plus transactions last year, compared to six in 2023. Commitments from pension funds and insurance companies to blended finance transactions last year held on at $1.6 billion. “While these volumes are infinitesimal by private sector standards, it’s a positive direction,” Convergence’s Joan Larrea said in the report. “Longstanding providers of vital catalytic and concessional capital are retreating, and while the current report saw the market holding steady, we’re starting to see the stirrings of a new reality.”

  • Shifting landscape. With the US’s retreat, Japan and the United Arab Emirates have become the leading providers of development finance for blended climate deals worldwide. Japan’s development agency, the Japan International Cooperation Agency, and the UAE’s $30 billion climate fund ALTÉRRA accounted for about 70% of development dollars in Convergence’s deal tally last year. A blended adaptation-finance loan vehicle from Japanese financial giant MUFG Bank, Canadian development finance institution FinDev Canada and the Green Climate Fund reached a $600 million fundraising milestone this week. The GAIA Climate Loan Fund, for “markets most severely impacted by, and least equipped to respond to, climate change,” is aiming to reach a final close of nearly $1.5 billion by 2027. Allianz, Cygnum Capital and Meridian all have blended climate funds, with a median size of $460 million. 
  • Latin America blended finance survey. ImpactAlpha and Convergence have joined forces to better understand and map the blended finance ecosystem, starting in Latin America. Your input will help us identify key trends, actors, and opportunities shaping the region. Take the survey.
  • Keep reading. 

Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent

📣 ImpactAlpha is hiring! We’re recruiting a business development associate to support the launch of ImpactSpace. The position is a contract role with potential to renew or transition to full-time status based on performance.

Jesse Corradi, ex- US International Development Finance Corp., joins CalSTRS as an associate portfolio manager on its sustainable investment and stewardship strategies team… Expect Equity welcomes Julie Won, former managing partner at Hanson and Doremus Investment Management, as portfolio manager of its second fund… Overture Ventures promotes Emma McDonagh to principal.

GAWA Capital seeks a Latin America-focused senior investment officer in Madrid… Acumen has an opening for a Colombia-based analyst for its Acumen Academy… IDB Invest is recruiting a business strategy lead officer in Washington, DC… Man Group is recruiting a stewardship analyst in London. 

Invest-NL is looking for an investment manager in Amsterdam… Clean Energy Ventures is on the hunt for an investment analyst… Arnold Ventures seeks a senior associate of mission-aligned investments in New York… GSG Impact is hosting, “Insights from the journeys of Asian families driving impact investment,” Thursday, Nov. 13.

👉 View (or post) impact investing jobs on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub.

Thank you for your impact!

– Nov. 6, 2025