Petrobras and the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) opened a public call for proposals under the ProFloresta+ program to buy 5 million high-integrity carbon credits tied to Amazon restoration. The move seeks to boost forest restoration in the Amazon. It will also set a clear price benchmark for restoration credits and aims to create jobs and attract finance in the restoration sector.
What Petrobras and BNDES Want from Developers
The public notice covers five contracts of 1 million carbon credits each. Each contract must be backed by ecological restoration on at least 3,000 hectares. Contracts will last for 25 years. They will focus on areas within the Amazon biome. This includes both private land and public land with forest concessions.
Key facts in brief:
- Five contracts × 1 million credits.
- Minimum 3,000 hectares per contract, restored and verified.
- 25-year crediting and monitoring horizon.
The tender comes at a time when Brazil’s voluntary carbon market is growing. According to market surveys, Brazil issued about 14–16 million voluntary credits per year from 2021 to 2023. ARR (Afforestation, Reforestation, and Revegetation) credits accounted for about 10–15% of these total issuances.
The ProFloresta+ purchase of 5 million credits is a large amount. It’s much larger than the current supply of restoration credits.
Financing the Forest: How ProFloresta+ Unlocks Capital
Petrobras will buy the carbon credits through public tenders. Winning project developers may then get low-interest loans or financing from BNDES to cover upfront costs.
The Brazilian bank created tools to reduce financial risk for restoration companies and landowners. This pairing of long-term offtake and concessional finance is meant to make restoration projects bankable.
Over the past decade, carbon markets have shown that early funding is a barrier for landowners who want to begin restoration. BNDES’ model tries to fix this by offering credit lines with longer repayment periods and by supporting milestone-based contracts. Payments for credits are expected to follow a schedule tied to planting, survival rates, and verified carbon removals.
ProFloresta+ enters a market where ARR credits from the Amazon have sold for US$8 to US$18 per tonne. Prices vary based on quality, verification standards, and project risks. Petrobras hasn’t revealed its expected clearing price yet. However, the public tender sets a reference point for buyers and sellers to see.
The chart shows an indicative low, a broad nature-based market average, and an observed Brazil ARR average (USD per tCO₂e).
The Road to 50,000 Hectares
ProFloresta+ is framed as a multi-phase program. The initial phase targets about 15,000 hectares and 5 million credits, backed by roughly R$450 million (about US$77 million).
Over a longer horizon, the program states it can restore up to 50,000 hectares and sequester an estimated 15 million tonnes of CO₂. Organizers also expect thousands of local jobs in planting, maintenance, and monitoring.
Average CO₂ absorption rates help explain the numbers. Research on the Amazon biome shows that restoring native forests can remove 8 to 15 tonnes of CO₂ per hectare each year in early growth.
As the forests mature, they store even more CO₂ over the long term. Assisted natural regeneration can achieve similar rates in degraded lands that still have seed banks. These benchmarks support the program’s estimate of long-term removals.
Amazon deforestation trends also show why the program is urgent. INPE satellite data recorded nearly 13,000 km² of deforestation in 2021, which fell to around 9,000 km² in 2023 after new enforcement measures.
Scientists estimate that over 54.2 million hectares of the Amazon have been lost in 20 years and need active or assisted restoration. The ProFloresta+ restoration area is small compared with this total, but it can test large-scale finance models.
Officials estimate the pilot will create about 4,500 jobs. It will also set clear rules and prices for restoration credits. Past restoration programs in Brazil and Latin America usually create 2–4 jobs per hectare during planting.
For long-term monitoring and maintenance, they generate 1–2 jobs per hectare. These figures help explain how large-scale planting can support rural employment.
Why This Tender Could Redefine Brazil’s Carbon Landscape
The program marks one of the largest public tenders for restoration credits in Brazil. It links a major corporate buyer (Petrobras) with a development bank to deliver scaled restoration. This structure can do three things:
- It provides price clarity.
- It reduces financing gaps for projects.
- It builds market confidence for high-integrity, nature-based credits.
Brazil is now a leading supplier of forest-related credits worldwide. REDD+, ARR, and agroforestry methods back this growth. But ARR supply has grown more slowly because restoration is expensive and long-term.
The chart shows indicative ARR credit price trends from 2019–2024, starting with broader market averages due to limited early ARR data. Reliable ARR-specific prices were not published in 2019–2020, so the series begins in 2021 with broader voluntary carbon market averages.
Prices rise from about US$4/t in 2021 to over US$7/t in 2022, dip slightly in 2023, then jump sharply in 2024 as demand for high-integrity nature-based removals strengthens.
A project involving 3,000 hectares usually needs several million dollars in early investment. Public tenders like ProFloresta+ help bridge this gap.
Public tenders of this size are rare. Indonesia’s peatland and mangrove restoration programs have offered fewer large-volume restoration credit offtake tenders. In contrast, Congo Basin countries have emphasized REDD+ over ARR.
As such, ProFloresta+ is unique. It combines public procurement with development bank financing. It also includes long-term monitoring requirements.
Trust but Verify: How Brazil Will Track Every Tonne
The call requires robust verification and long monitoring periods. Projects must follow recognized restoration practices and provide measurable carbon removals.
BNDES and Petrobras require documentation, monitoring, and a 25-year contract to ensure credits are real, additional, and permanent.
Most Brazilian projects use international standards like Verra VCS or Gold Standard, alongside the national carbon registry, field audits, and remote sensing. Developers must follow restoration protocols, including native species, minimum density, and survival monitoring.
To ensure permanence, 10–20% of credits are often placed in a buffer pool, with some using insurance against fire, drought, or pests. Developers must submit baseline studies, restoration plans, and social-environmental safeguards, and undergo audits and reporting to qualify for credits and BNDES financing. Public tender results will be transparent.
Weighing ProFloresta+’s Impact
Proponents list several benefits of the program:
- It channels immediate demand and revenue to restoration projects.
- It uses public procurement to set market standards and prices.
- It couples purchases with concessional finance to lower project risks.
The program also aims to support social safeguards. Restoration in the Amazon often requires consent from local communities, Indigenous groups, and landholders. Many programs now include benefit-sharing rules, training, and local hiring. Monitoring includes checks on land use rights and social co-benefits.
But limits remain. Restoration takes time; carbon removals accrue over decades. Projects must manage risks such as fires, pests, land-use conflicts, and changing climate conditions.
Credit buyers and financiers need confidence that credits remain valid over long periods. Observers say the program will only prove effective if verification and long-term protection are strong.
A High-Stakes Test for Restoration at Scale
The public call opens the clock for proposals. Petrobras and BNDES will evaluate bids and award contracts. If the pilot goes as planned, the program can expand to more hectares and credits. This might also inspire other companies to start similar tenders. Many energy, aviation, and consumer goods companies in Brazil want to buy carbon credits. This shows that the market is growing.
The tender could strengthen Brazil’s restoration market by proving that public, transparent purchasing and concessional finance can bring large projects to scale. Success will depend on strong verification, durable finance, and effective on-the-ground management across the program’s long timeframe.
The post Petrobras and BNDES Launch a 5-Million Carbon Credit Push to Regrow Brazil’s Amazon appeared first on Carbon Credits.
For most businesses, the emissions that matter most sit outside their own walls. Scope 3 emissions, everything generated across your value chain, from the suppliers who make your inputs to the customers who use your products, typically make up the majority of a company’s total carbon footprint. Under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), those value-chain emissions now have to be measured and disclosed with a rigour that spend-based estimates alone struggle to satisfy. This guide sets out how to improve Scope 3 data accuracy for CSRD: the calculation methods open to you, how to move from estimates to verified supplier data, and how to govern that data so it holds up to audit.
A carbon credit is a commitment that extends well into the future. The tonne of CO₂ compensated for today from a nature-based carbon project must remain out of the atmosphere for good, which means the forest behind the credit has to remain standing long after the transaction is complete. For any buyer, this raises a defining question: What ensures that the forest endures?
What replaced the cheap REDD credit on the boardroom slide deck, and why procurement is leading the rewrite.
Three years ago, a corporate slide showing a portfolio of cheap REDD+ credits could carry a board meeting. The number was big, the price was low, and the press release wrote itself. Today, that same slide gets sent back with questions. The questions are uncomfortable, the answers are unclear, and your general counsel is suddenly in the room.
Conventional carbon offsets are not dead. The voluntary carbon market retired 202 million tonnes in 2025, and the Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing survey published in January 2026 confirmed that interest from corporate buyers remains substantial. What changed is the credibility threshold. The integrity floor has risen, the disclosure scrutiny has tightened, and the buyer profile has shifted. This article tracks what changed, what sophisticated buyers now ask before signing, and what serious corporates are putting on the board slide instead.
What boards used to buy, and why it stopped working
The 2020 to 2022 model was simple: buy a large tranche of avoidance credits at low single-digit prices, retire them against the company footprint, announce the carbon-neutral claim, and move on. Most of those credits came from REDD+ projects, renewable energy installations in countries where the renewable energy was already economic, or methane projects with thin documentation.
Several things broke that model. Academic research published in 2023, including a widely cited Science paper, found that the majority of REDD+ credits issued under the most common methodologies did not represent additional reductions when tested against rigorous counterfactuals. The Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative published its Claims Code of Practice, which sets requirements for what companies can credibly claim from credit use. The European Union finalised its Green Claims Directive, restricting how companies can describe products as climate-neutral. France’s Décret 2022-539 already restricts carbon neutrality advertising. California’s AB 1305 imposes disclosure requirements on any company making net-zero or carbon-neutral claims while doing business in the state.
The collective effect: the cheap credit no longer buys the announcement, and the announcement now carries litigation risk.
The integrity reset: ICVCM, VCMI, and what changed
The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market published the Core Carbon Principles in 2023 and began assessing methodologies against them in 2024. The first methodologies received the CCP label later that year. The point of the label is to give corporate buyers a defensible quality screen they can cite in disclosure.
The Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative complements this on the demand side. Its Claims Code of Practice defines what a buyer can say (Silver, Gold, or Platinum claims, with associated requirements) based on the quality of credits used and the underlying decarbonisation strategy. Together, CCP and VCMI build a quality stack: CCP on the supply, VCMI on the claim, with the science-based target sitting underneath both.
The reset is not a ban on offsets. It is a ratchet. Credits that meet the new bar continue to clear; credits that do not, do not. The Morgan Stanley survey found that 61% of current buyers like the CCP label concept but that supply of labelled credits remains limited. That supply constraint is now visible in pricing.
What sophisticated buyers ask before they sign
The questions on the procurement scorecard have changed. A 2022 buyer might have asked about price, vintage, and project type. A 2026 buyer asks five different questions before any of those.
- What does the counterfactual look like, and who validated it.
- What is the permanence regime, and what is the buffer pool exposure.
- What is the leakage risk, and how is it mitigated.
- What rating has the project received from the independent ratings agencies (Sylvera, BeZero, Calyx Global), and what was the rationale.
- What is the documentation discipline that survives an audit four years from now when the procurement team that signed the contract has moved on.
If the vendor cannot answer those five questions on a first call, the conversation ends. Conversely, if the vendor can answer them with documented specificity, the conversation often expands beyond a single transaction toward a multi-year engagement.
Where this leaves your near-term commitments
You probably have near-term commitments that pre-date the integrity reset. Public targets to be carbon neutral by 2025 or 2030. Product-level claims that ran in last year’s marketing. Disclosed reduction trajectories that assumed continued access to cheap credits.
You have three workable paths. The first is to re-baseline your strategy, replacing the most exposed credits with higher-quality alternatives and adjusting the public language to match what you can defend. The second is to shift the underlying spend from offsetting outside your value chain to investing inside your value chain, where reductions count against Scope 3 directly and the audit trail is cleaner. The third is to keep the strategy and absorb the risk, which is increasingly the most expensive option once you price in litigation, restatement, and reputational exposure.
Most serious buyers are choosing the second path. It moves the carbon spend from a compliance cost to a procurement and resilience investment, and it removes the central failure point of the legacy model: the disconnect between where the emissions occurred and where the reductions sat. Nature-based supply chain investments, structured under the GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard and aligned to the SBTi FLAG Guidance, are the asset class that fits this brief. They generate inventory-grade reductions, they produce audit-grade documentation, and they survive the new claim restrictions because the carbon math sits inside the value chain that the disclosure already covers.
If you are reassessing a carbon strategy under the new integrity bar, or rebuilding a board narrative that has to survive a more skeptical audience, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help. The Dual-Value Model gives you a defensible alternative to legacy offset purchases, with the documentation and operational integration that survives the procurement scorecard and the audit. Schedule a consultation.
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