Nestlé, the Swiss food and drink giant, has committed to two major restoration projects in Brazil to generate carbon credits. The company is working with re.green, a Brazilian restoration company, and chocolatier Barry Callebaut on these projects.
They aim to cut down Nestlé’s carbon footprint. At the same time, they aim to restore degraded lands, plant native trees, and support more sustainable supply chains for cocoa and coffee.
Planting Millions: Nestlé’s Brazil Projects
Nestlé’s deal with re.green focuses on restoring roughly 2,000 hectares in Bahia’s Atlantic Forest. Over a 30-year period, the project plans to plant around 3.3 million native trees.
Re.green estimates this will create around 880,000 tonnes of CO₂-equivalent in carbon credits. This is based on a strong ARR (Afforestation, Reforestation, and Revegetation) method.
In a second initiative, Nestlé and Barry Callebaut will work on 6,000 hectares across Bahia and Pará. This project will turn degraded land into a mixed agroforestry system—mainly cocoa trees plus native species.
The plan calls for planting 7.7 million seedlings over many years. This agroforestry system is expected to generate around 600,000 tonnes of carbon credits.
Altogether, Nestlé’s efforts in Brazil cover about 8,000 hectares and aim to plant roughly 11 million trees.
Why This Deal Matters for Climate and Business
This deal is strategically important for Nestlé on several fronts. First, it supports its climate goals. These project credits reduce carbon in the atmosphere. This helps Nestlé aim for net-zero emissions in the long run.
Second, the projects improve Nestlé’s supply chain resilience. Restoring landscapes where the company sources cocoa and coffee helps to keep these regions healthy.
Third, these are not just tree-planting projects. Restoration boosts biodiversity, enhances soil quality, safeguards water resources, and helps local communities. Using native species in the Atlantic Forest helps preserve one of Brazil’s most threatened biomes.
Finally, the deal is a signal of long-term commitment. Nestlé is more than just buying credits. It’s creating nature-based solutions that match its business and environmental goals.
Nestlé’s Roadmap to Net-Zero
- Nestlé has set bold climate targets. The company aims to plant 200 million trees by 2030 and achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
In its 2024 Non-Financial Statement, Nestlé clarifies that it will not use carbon credits outside its value chain to achieve its main net-zero goals. Instead, it invests in nature-based solutions tied directly to its sourcing regions.
Nestlé uses rigorous approaches to estimate greenhouse gas removals. It accounts for tree growth, species types, soil differences, and uses field data and science-based models. It also meets global standards, like those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the GHG Protocol. This helps ensure transparency and accuracy.
In addition to reforestation, Nestlé partners on regenerative agriculture. For instance, it has a global agroforestry initiative with OFI (Olam Food Ingredients). This program will help 25,000 farmers in Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire, and Nigeria change their farms.
- The plan includes planting 2.8 million trees and transforming more than 72,000 hectares into agroforestry systems over time.
These combined efforts show how Nestlé links carbon removal, biodiversity restoration, and sustainable farming to its broader climate strategy.
Nestlé’s Nescafé hit its 2025 target early by sourcing 32% of its coffee through regenerative agriculture in 2024. This gives it a strong lead toward the 2030 goal of 50%.
The company has invested over $1 billion. This supports more than 200,000 farmers on 400,000 hectares. They train these farmers in methods like shade trees, natural composting, and cover crops.
These practices help restore soil health and lower the need for chemicals. They have also cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20-40% per kilogram of green coffee. They also help Nestlé reach its goal of halving production-related emissions by 2030 and achieving net-zero by 2050.
Backing the Green: Funding and Market Momentum
These reforestation deals come amid strong momentum in Brazil’s nature-based carbon sector. The Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) approved an $85 million loan for ARR projects. These projects should create about 2.47 million carbon credits.
Meanwhile, re.green itself has won fresh financing. It secured 80 million reais (approx. US$14 million) from BNDES, with Bradesco as a financial partner. The deal helps re.green scale up restoration in key biomes.
Credits from ARR projects in Brazil, especially those using high-quality methods, should trade for around $55 per tonne of CO₂ equivalent. This carbon price can vary based on deal structures.
This shows that both public and private resources are flowing into nature-based carbon solutions. For Nestlé, joining this trend offers both environmental benefits and strategic value.
Impact for Business and Nature
These contracted projects by Nestlé have a significant impact on business and nature:
- Credible Carbon Removal:
Nestlé is funding long-term restoration projects linked to its supply chain. This helps create high-integrity carbon credits instead of just buying generic ones. - Sustainable Sourcing:
Restoring tree cover in cocoa and coffee regions strengthens the ecological base of Nestlé’s ingredient supply. - Corporate Climate Leadership:
This move positions Nestlé as a leader in tying net-zero goals to meaningful, nature-based actions. - Market Signal:
Big corporate deals like this could drive more investment in restoration. This would boost Brazil’s carbon credit market and increase the supply of high-quality nature credits.
What Could Go Wrong? Nestlé’s Bold Step in Carbon Leadership
While this initiative is ambitious, its success depends on several factors. Tree survival over decades is crucial: saplings must grow, persist, and avoid being lost to fires or land-use changes. Long-term monitoring is needed to make sure the credits represent real removal.
Also, the permanence and additionality of the credits matter. Observers will watch how re.green, Nestlé, and their auditors ensure that the forest does not revert and that the project would not have happened without this financing.
Finally, the social dimension is important. Local communities must benefit, and land rights and governance issues should be handled transparently. Without community support, restoration projects often struggle.
Nestlé’s carbon credit deal with re.green and Barry Callebaut marks a significant and strategic step in its climate journey. Its net-zero strategy focuses on nature-based solutions, backed by careful accounting and long-term commitments. Public and private investors in Brazil’s carbon market are also backing this shift.
If the projects succeed, they could show big companies how to scale regenerative landscapes. This approach can help not only to offset emissions but also to build stronger business foundations.
The post Nestlé to Plant 11 Million Trees in Brazil to Generate Carbon Credits and Boost Sustainability appeared first on Carbon Credits.
Most businesses that decide to act on their net-zero targets reach the same point of friction. Buying carbon credits has meant tracking down brokers, sitting through sales calls, and requesting a quote just to learn a price, sometimes with limited proof of what you are buying.
The earnings calls that quietly reframed climate from sustainability question to operating risk.
Three earnings calls in the last 18 months tell the story without any help from a press release.
Hershey, May 2024: cocoa price exposure compresses margin, and the company attributes part of the cost shock to West African weather. Olam, July 2024: coffee climate exposure quantified in the annual report. JBS, January 2025: supply chain climate disclosures expanded materially in response to investor pressure and regulatory expectation. None of these companies issued the announcement as climate news. They issued it as financial news. The climate-linked supply chain risk did not arrive with a sustainability framing; it arrived as a P&L line.
You are probably reading this article because you suspect the same thing is happening to your business. This piece walks through what is showing up on which earnings calls, how procurement and finance leaders are quantifying the exposure, and what serious corporates are doing about it before the regulator asks.
Where climate risk has already appeared in earnings
The pattern is consistent across resource-intensive sectors. A weather event compresses supply, the price spikes, the cost flows through the income statement, and the analyst on the call asks whether the event is anomalous or structural. Increasingly, the honest answer is the second one.
Cocoa is the cleanest example. The 2023 to 2024 West African harvest fell sharply on the back of erratic rainfall and disease. Cocoa futures more than tripled. Companies with concentrated West African sourcing absorbed the cost; companies with diversified sourcing absorbed less. The exposure was not climate as ESG topic. It was climate as cost of goods.
Coffee follows the same pattern. Brazilian and Vietnamese harvests have moved on weather more sharply across the last several seasons. Roasters with long-tenor supplier relationships and origin diversification have managed the volatility; roasters with spot-market exposure have not. Wheat, sugar, palm oil, beef: the same dynamic in different commodities, a pattern the IPCC AR6 Working Group II report projects will intensify across agricultural systems through mid-century.
What this means: climate risk is no longer a footnote in the 10-K. It is a line item the CFO has to explain on the call.
The three commodity exposures that hit margin first
For most companies with material Scope 3 exposure, three exposures dominate the near-term P&L risk.
- Concentrated single-origin sourcing in a climate-vulnerable region. If your tier-one supply for any material commodity sits in one geography, you have a concentration risk that climate amplifies. Diversification across origins is the obvious hedge, but it takes years to build and requires relationships you cannot acquire by tender.
- Supplier financial fragility under climate stress. Smallholder farmers, who supply a large share of the global cocoa, coffee, and palm oil market, do not carry the balance sheets to absorb yield shocks. When yields collapse, they exit. When they exit, your supply base shrinks, and the surviving suppliers raise prices. The risk is structural, not cyclical.
- Logistics and storage exposure to extreme weather. Hurricane disruptions to Gulf shipping, drought-driven Panama Canal restrictions, flooding in European inland waterways: each of these has moved input costs in the last three years, a pattern documented in Munich Re’s natural catastrophe data. The exposure shows up as a one-quarter event in the financial press but accumulates over time on the cost line.
TCFD and ISSB disclosure changes
The disclosure architecture has now caught up with the risk. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, whose recommendations are now embedded in the ISSB’s IFRS S2 climate standard, requires companies to disclose climate-related risks across physical and transition categories, with quantification where possible.
For physical risk specifically (the climate-linked supply chain risk you are reading about), the disclosure must address both acute exposures (extreme weather events) and chronic exposures (gradual changes in temperature, precipitation, and growing seasons). The disclosure must address the time horizon over which the risk is material, the parts of the value chain exposed, and the financial impact under different scenarios.
The CSRD imposes similar requirements under European law, with double materiality (both financial and impact materiality) embedded in the assessment. The practical effect: your auditors and your investor relations team now need a defensible answer to the climate-linked supply chain risk question, and the answer needs to be quantified.
What procurement and finance can do now
Three actions matter near-term.
Map your exposure. Most companies do not have a clear view of which tier-one and tier-two suppliers sit in which climate-vulnerable geographies. Without the map, you cannot quantify the risk, and without the quantification, you cannot disclose it credibly. The map is the foundation, and World Resources Institute climate risk research provides useful public tooling to start.
Diversify and deepen, in that order. Diversification across origins reduces concentration risk, but the deeper move is to invest in the resilience of the suppliers you already have. Regenerative practices, agroforestry, soil health interventions: these reduce yield volatility under climate stress and protect your input cost trajectory.
Embed the climate spend inside procurement, not outside it. Treating climate risk as a sustainability cost line subordinates it to the ESG budget. Treating it as a procurement and resilience investment puts it in the budget that matters, which is the cost-of-goods budget that the CFO defends quarterly.
Nature-based supply chain investments are the asset class designed for exactly this purpose. They sit inside the value chain, they reduce climate-linked supply risk, they generate verifiable Scope 3 reductions, and they produce the documentation an auditor and a regulator can both test.
If you are quantifying climate-linked supply chain risk in advance of the next earnings cycle or the next disclosure period, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you map your exposure and structure a Dual-Value Model response that addresses reduction, resilience, and disclosure-readiness in a single program. Schedule a consultation.
More and more small and medium-sized businesses are hearing the same question from their larger customers: What is your carbon footprint? That question now travels down entire supply chains, and it arrives next to tender requirements, certification criteria, and rising customer expectations.
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