Across the Amazon, hundreds of communities depend on forest-based livelihoods rooted in traditional knowledge, sustainable production, and long-term stewardship of the land. However, distance from urban centers, limited digital connectivity, and structural barriers often prevent these communities from accessing financial services and credit designed to support their work.
To address these challenges at scale, Banco do Brasil has developed the Bioeconomy Finance Hub, a regional platform designed to strengthen sustainable value chains, expand access to financial services, and support reforestation and bioeconomy activities across Brazil’s strategic biomes. Operating at a regional level allows the Hub to move beyond isolated projects and focus on aggregate impact, ensuring solutions reach more communities consistently and effectively.
The Bioeconomy Finance Hub functions as a point of convergence for communities, cooperatives, civil society organizations, governments, and financial institutions. Through this integrated approach, the Hub promotes training, market intelligence, technical assistance, and support for productive and environmental compliance, helping to structure forest-compatible businesses and improve access to impact-oriented credit.
Through the regional Hub model, Banco do Brasil has already invested more than R$2 billion in forest-compatible product chains, impacting over 70,000 people across the Legal Amazon. The Bank expects this figure to reach R$5 billion in outstanding balance by 2030, with the potential to positively impact approximately 1 million people through income and employment linked to Amazon-based products.
The Hub’s core purpose is to transform socio-bioeconomy assets into viable income-generating opportunities, positioning the bioeconomy as a strategy for sustainable development, social inclusion, territorial protection, and reforestation. By operating regionally, the Hub accelerates access to credit, organizes production flows, connects buyers, and promotes benefit-sharing, creating a stronger and more competitive business environment aligned with forest conservation.
Within this regional framework, communities such as Arapiranga, near Belém in the state of Pará, illustrate how the model works in practice. Local families cultivate açaí, cocoa, taperebá, cupuaçu, and other regional products while preserving ancestral knowledge and keeping the forest standing. For Wagner Ferreira, one of the community leaders, Banco do Brasil’s initiative “supported local culture, encouraged financial inclusion, and strengthened family farming practices that preserve the forest.”
He notes that access to financial services has produced tangible changes. “Keeping the forest standing also means taking care of the people who protect this knowledge. Many families only realized after opening a bank account that investment could support both business growth and social development in the community.”
This regional approach is aligned with Agenda 30, Banco do Brasil’s long-term sustainability strategy launched more than 20 years ago and updated most recently in September. Agenda 30 outlines ten strategic commitments and nineteen targets structured around sustainable finance; social, environmental, and climate governance; and positive impacts across value chains.
The Bioeconomy Finance Hub plays a central role in advancing these commitments by unlocking bioeconomy initiatives across the Amazon and other strategic regions. Its work extends beyond agriculture to include diverse community enterprises, such as a women-led seamstresses’ collective in Arapiranga, demonstrating how financial inclusion can strengthen resilience and income across different sectors
“It’s gratifying to see how our work supports changes in production and also the self-esteem and future prospects of the communities,” says Ana Claudia Melo, project manager of the hub in Belém. “All of this only truly works when we act from the inside out: with active listening, placing the extractive worker at the center of the process, and establishing partnerships that allow us to offer an integrated set of actions. We work transversally and intersectionally.”
Banco do Brasil’s regional Hub approach underscores a practical reality: reforestation and the bioeconomy depend not only on investment, but on whether financial systems can reach communities in ways that make participation feasible. By strengthening regional access to credit and services, the Bioeconomy Finance Hub helps ensure that forest conservation and economic development move forward together.
Want the full list of Agenda 30 targets? You can explore Banco do Brasil’s Agenda 30 commitments here.