The Amazon Fund is forbidden to raise money unless the forest stops being cut down. Its own annual report calls it the largest global REDD+ fund, on the authority of the Climate Funds Update dashboard. Its annual fundraising ceiling is a subtraction. Take the historical average deforestation rate in the Legal Amazon, subtract the area actually cleared in the year being assessed, multiply what is left by the tonnes of carbon a hectare of that forest holds, and the answer is how much reduction the country may raise money against. The national space research institute measures the rate, the environment ministry sets the method, a technical committee certifies the arithmetic, and only then may the national development bank take a donation against that year. It is a funding rule that can switch itself off, and once it did.
The fund was created by Decree 6.527 on 1 August 2008 and began operating the following year. It makes non-repayable grants against deforestation and for conservation and sustainable use in the Legal Amazon, and up to a fifth of its money may go to monitoring systems in Brazil's other biomes and in other tropical countries. The BNDES manages it. Two committees sit above the bank: a technical one that certifies the emission reductions, and a steering committee of federal, state and civil society benches that sets the spending rules by consensus across all three, and on which a state governor may only sit if that state has a deforestation plan of its own.
The years the rule went quiet
The committee publishes the tonnage it certifies year by year, and the series tells the story of the mechanism better than any commentary on it. For 2014 the certified reduction was 558.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. For 2015 it was 500.8 million. For 2016 it was 12.0 million. For 2017, 58.0 million; for 2018, 29.3 million. The rule did not change in those three years. Deforestation rose, the subtraction produced almost nothing, and the legal basis for accepting new money went with it.
Then the committee itself was dissolved in 2019, its last meeting having been held in 2018 to assess the 2017 reductions. Decree 11.368 of 1 January 2023 recreated it, with specialists nominated by the environment ministry after consulting the Brazilian Forum on Climate Change, and it met again on 16 April 2024 to certify the figures for 2018, reopening fundraising for a year that had ended more than five years earlier. The same decree recreated the steering committee, this time with the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples on its federal bench.
What a donor receives is a diploma: a named, non-transferable certificate recording the sum contributed, the tonnes of avoided carbon it corresponds to, and the reference year of those emissions. The report states in terms that the diplomas generate no rights or credits of any nature, which is the sentence separating this instrument from a carbon market. Across every donation received to the end of 2024 the certified total stands at 81,519,205 tonnes of carbon, which the fund converts to 298,903,751.67 tonnes of carbon dioxide.
Eight donors, and one of them is most of it
By the end of 2024 the fund had taken in R$ 4,536,257,045.01, which the report gives as USD 1,494,518,758.34 at the exchange rates on the dates the bank actually received the money. Norway accounts for 76.5 per cent of that, R$ 3,469,251,818.36, contributed under a krone contract and a dollar one. Germany, through KfW, is 8.6 per cent, the United States 6.4 per cent, the United Kingdom 6.3 per cent, Denmark 1.0 per cent, Switzerland 0.6 per cent, Petrobras 0.4 per cent and Japan 0.3 per cent. Two of the contracts are only partly drawn: of GBP 80,000,000 contracted by the United Kingdom, GBP 39,260,000 had been paid in, and of DKK 150,000,000 contracted by Denmark, DKK 50,000,000. A pledge and a deposit are different facts and the fund reports them in separate columns.
Before the 2019 suspension the fund had three donors. It ended 2024 with eight, all seven international ones having paid in during 2023 or 2024. The diversification is recent enough that it has barely moved Norway's share, which is the structural risk here. Under the founding decree the bank keeps donations segregated in its own books, and 3 per cent of them covers operating costs.
Approved and disbursed are different numbers
The distance between them is the honest measure of a grant fund. By the close of 2024 the Amazon Fund had approved R$ 2.99 billion across 119 projects and had actually disbursed R$ 1.76 billion of it. Seventy four of the projects were finished, seven of them during 2024. By value, 51 per cent went to public bodies, 48 per cent to non-governmental organisations and 1 per cent to international institutions.
2024 was the fund's largest approval year, at R$ 932 million of new projects, against R$ 990 million paid in by donors over the same twelve months. What was committed shows what the money is for: up to R$ 45 million for each of the nine Legal Amazon states for firefighting; R$ 450 million contracted for native vegetation recovery, against a national target of 12 million hectares restored by 2030; and R$ 332 million selected under a schools and sustainable produce call. Cumulatively the portfolio reports 192 conservation units and 122 Amazonian indigenous lands supported, 2,123 environmental enforcement missions and 259,000 people reached by sustainable production activities.
The tax that pays a mayor to keep a park
Brazil's other well known conservation instrument is not a fund at all but a rule for dividing a tax that already exists. States pass part of their value added tax receipts down to their municipalities and legislate their own formula for the split. Parana wrote an environmental criterion into its formula in 1991, and the agency that administers it says the design was quickly taken up as the example other states followed.
The current Parana statute is Complementary Law 249 of 23 August 2022, in force for indices calculated from 2023. It sets eight criteria. Sixty five per cent of the pool goes by value added, 10 per cent by school learning and equity indicators, 8 per cent by agricultural output, 6 per cent by rural population and 2 per cent each on three further heads. The last 5 per cent goes to municipalities that contain conservation units, are directly influenced by them, or hold water sources supplying a neighbouring town. That criterion rests on a clause of the state constitution, and paragraph 3 of the law divides it exactly in half between the water sources and the protected areas. The law's definition of a conservation unit is wide, reaching from ecological stations and parks to forest nurseries and indigenous reserve areas in public or private hands, and a municipality qualifying on both grounds takes whichever pays more.
The state water and land institute calculates each municipality's environmental factor annually, one directorate taking the protected areas and another the water sources, and publishes the payments to the centavo. In 2025 the protected areas half transferred R$ 329,803,223.86 in twelve instalments, and the water source table reports the same total, which is what an even statutory division of a single pool should produce. The institute describes the scheme as a reallocation of tax revenue on environmental grounds, so what a municipality receives turns on its own commitment to the areas it holds. What it is not is a payment sized to the cost of running them, and a mayor whose tax base shrinks sees the environmental payment shrink with it however well the park is kept.
The agency that lives off visitors and violators
The federal protected area estate is run by ICMBio, created by Law 11.516 of 28 August 2007. It manages 340 federal conservation units covering about 81.2 million hectares of land, roughly 9.1 per cent of the national territory, and 91.8 million hectares of sea. In 2024 it committed R$ 1,021.4 million, about 87.1 per cent of an updated appropriation of R$ 1,177.2 million, and paid out R$ 890.6 million of what it had committed.
The revenue side shows the shape of the agency. Receipts from visitation concessions and vegetation clearance authorisations made up 82.49 per cent of everything ICMBio collected in 2024. That was 124.28 per cent up on 2023. The agency attributes the increase principally to one concession contract for Jericoacoara National Park with a fixed grant payment of R$ 61,000,000. Visitation itself, whether charged by a concessionaire or at the gate, brought in R$ 55,394,779.31.
Fines are the volatile line. Penalties were 13.06 per cent of collections in 2024, a rise of 521.29 per cent, driven by one judicial settlement in which Samarco Mineracao S.A. paid R$ 52,006,300.00 under a single infraction notice. Including it, and counting transfers to the national environment fund and legal charges, fines reached R$ 65,993,396.65, the most the agency records collecting under that heading since its creation; strip the settlement out and the figure is R$ 13,987,096.65, against R$ 10,644,796.86 in 2023. A 2023 decree meanwhile raised that fund's share of fine revenue from 20 per cent to 50, so the agency keeps less of each penalty.
Alongside the budget sits article 36 of the 2000 protected areas law, which requires the developer of a project with significant environmental impact to support the upkeep of conservation units. Fifty such agreements were signed in 2024, all to be settled by deposit into the environmental compensation fund and together worth around R$ 1.15 billion once revalued at deposit. What was actually spent through that fund in the year was R$ 163 million. External projects and compensation together came to R$ 249 million of execution, of which international cooperation programmes, among them the Amazon protected areas programme and four Global Environment Facility projects, accounted for R$ 81.2 million.
Three mechanisms, three different things the money is anchored to. The Amazon Fund is anchored to a measured environmental outcome, which is why it can stop. The Parana transfer is anchored to a consumption tax base, which is why it grows with the economy rather than with the estate. ICMBio is anchored to visitors, licence applicants and polluters, which is why one concession contract and one mining settlement explain most of what its revenue did in a single year. None of the three is indexed to what the protected areas cost to run, and none of the documents behind them claims otherwise.
Sources
Every figure, date and deal name above is drawn from one of the documents below. Each was fetched and cached on the retrieval date shown.
- Fundo Amazonia, Relatorio de Atividades 2024. The fund's own annual report, published by the BNDES and approved by its steering committee. Carries the fundraising rule and its equation, the technical committee's table of attested emission reductions by year, the full donor table, the portfolio totals and the results counts https://www.fundoamazonia.gov.br/export/sites/default/pt/.galleries/documentos/rafa/RAFA_2024_port.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30
- Fundo Amazonia, Comite Tecnico do Fundo Amazonia. The governance page for the committee that attests the emission reduction figures the fundraising ceiling is calculated from, and where its meeting minutes are published https://www.fundoamazonia.gov.br/pt/fundo-amazonia/governanca/CTFA/ Retrieved 2026-08-30
- Parana, Lei Complementar 249 de 23 de agosto de 2022. The statute in force since 1 January 2023 setting every criterion by which Parana divides the municipal share of its value added tax, including the environmental 5 per cent at article 1 inciso VII and its even split at paragraph 3. Hosted by the state legislation portal https://www.legislacao.pr.gov.br/legislacao/pesquisarAto.do?action=exibir&codAto=270797&codItemAto=1723140 Retrieved 2026-08-30
- Instituto Agua e Terra, Programa ICMS Ecologico. The Parana agency that calculates the environmental factors and administers both halves of the transfer, with its account of the scheme, its full legal basis list and its published data files https://www.iat.pr.gov.br/Pagina/ICMS-Ecologico Retrieved 2026-08-30
- Instituto Agua e Terra, Repasses mensais de ICMS Ecologico por Biodiversidade aos Municipios paranaenses em 2025. Every monthly payment to every municipality under the protected areas half, with the annual total https://www.iat.pr.gov.br/sites/agua-terra/arquivos_restritos/files/documento/2026-01/repasses_municipios_jan_dez_2025.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30
- Instituto Agua e Terra, Repasses mensais de ICMS Ecologico por Mananciais aos Municipios paranaenses em 2025. The same for the water source half, prepared by a different directorate https://www.iat.pr.gov.br/sites/agua-terra/arquivos_restritos/files/documento/2026-03/repasse_por_manancial_2025.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30
- Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservacao da Biodiversidade, Relatorio de Gestao Integrado 2024. The federal agency's accountability report for the financial year: the estate it manages, the budget appropriated against the budget committed, the composition of its own revenue, the environmental compensation obligation under article 36 of Law 9.985/2000, and the external cooperation programmes https://www.gov.br/icmbio/pt-br/acesso-a-informacao/auditorias/transparencia-e-prestacao-de-contas/relatorios-de-gestao/exercicio-2024/relatorio-de-gestao-integrado-2024-compactado-1.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30