Unlocking high-integrity investment for the world's greatest bioeconomy.
The Amazon basin is one of the world's most important living systems. Spanning eight countries and more than 6 million km², it supports over 50 million people, stores vast quantities of carbon, regulates rainfall across South America, and holds an estimated 10% of all species on Earth. Its future is a regional and global priority.
The Amazon also sits at the center of a rapidly expanding bioeconomy opportunity: one capable of generating jobs, strengthening livelihoods, protecting forests, and creating new markets for nature-positive growth. Yet this potential remains dramatically under-realized. The problem is not a lack of entrepreneurs, ideas, natural assets, or capital. It is a structural deficit of trust.
Investors, companies, public development banks, and local enterprises face a complex operating environment shaped by weak territorial governance, illicit economies, opaque supply chains, environmental crime, insecure land tenure, and fragmented risk intelligence. These risks raise the cost of capital, slow investment decisions, weaken market confidence, and prevent high-integrity ventures from scaling.
Derisking Amazonia was created to close this trust gap. Led by the Igarapé Institute, in strategic partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank Group and Rockefeller Foundation, the program converts risk from a deterrent into a manageable, measurable, and actionable investment condition to help protect forests and drive sustainable, equitable, and nature-positive development.
Strengthen investor confidence by generating credible, actionable intelligence on environmental, integrity, security, and territorial risks.
Support high-integrity bioeconomy investment by helping entrepreneurs, project developers, financial institutions, and public agencies identify, manage, and reduce risk.
Improve territorial governance by building the capacity of public institutions, subnational agencies, and local partners to detect, prevent, and respond to environmental crime and illicit economies.
Scale innovative risk management technologies, including AI-powered early warning systems, remote sensing, traceability tools, and financial intelligence platforms.
Center Indigenous peoples, women, and local communities as partners in territorial resilience, bioeconomy value chains, and investment security.
Contribute to a regional model of systemic derisking that can be adapted across the Amazon basin and other biodiversity-rich regions.
The program is designed to scale over time across the wider Amazon basin as partnerships, financing, and implementation capacity expand.
Derisking Amazonia develops georeferenced intelligence on environmental, integrity, and security risks affecting bioeconomy investment. This includes country-specific risk briefs, curated risk indicators, and subnational and municipal-level tools that help investors, project teams, and policymakers make better decisions.
The program identifies, tests, and scales technologies that can detect, monitor, and reduce risk. Priority areas include AI early warning systems, blockchain-based traceability, remote sensing, drone surveillance, and financial intelligence tools to detect irregular transactions linked to environmental crime.
Derisking Amazonia supports a pipeline of high-integrity bioeconomy ventures by working with entrepreneurs, accelerators, enterprise support organizations, and investors. The program helps businesses strengthen compliance, access blended finance, build market linkages, and scale across borders.
The initiative strengthens the public and institutional systems needed to sustain a derisked Amazon. This includes training for police, prosecutors, environmental agencies, Indigenous agencies, investors, and executing agencies, as well as policy dialogue and coordination through regional and global forums.
Derisking Amazonia places community resilience at the center of investment security. Indigenous peoples, women, environmental defenders, and traditional communities are not treated as beneficiaries, but as co-designers and partners. The program supports community-based governance, participation in bioeconomy value chains, Indigenous women's networks, and the integration of local knowledge into risk mapping and monitoring systems.
— Program brief, April 2026
To identify and respond to integrity and security risks across five Amazon countries.
Through access to subnational and municipal-level risk data and insights.
Through innovative technology pilots for risk management and territorial protection in high-priority areas.
Of investment-ready bioeconomy ventures.
In risk monitoring, environmental crime response, and technology-enabled enforcement.
Participation and inclusion through collaboration with Indigenous women's networks and local organizations.
Derisking Amazonia is led by the Igarapé Institute, through its Green Bridge Facility, in strategic partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank Group.
Including IDB Amazon Forever, IDB Invest, IDB Lab, the Office of Institutional Integrity, the Citizen Security and Justice program, and IDB country offices in Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.
A founding philanthropic partner committed to the initiative's regional approach, inter-disciplinary service offering, and outreach to local communities and Indigenous populations.
A wider network of subnational governments, entrepreneurial hubs, civil society organizations, Indigenous peoples, traditional communities, and local partners across the basin.
Derisking Amazonia is financed through IDB Lab's Amazon Bioeconomy Fund, supported by the Green Climate Fund, with philanthropic co-financing from The Rockefeller Foundation.
Derisking Amazonia is building the infrastructure of trust, intelligence, and capacity needed to unlock the investment flows on which that future depends. Join us in derisking the Amazon — and investing in a more secure, inclusive, and nature-positive future.