The world’s most biodiverse nation, Brazil, has belatedly published its UN plan for halting and reversing nature decline by the end of this decade.

Brazil is home to 10-15% of all known species on Earth, 64% of the Amazon rainforest and it supplies 10% of global food demand, according to official estimates.

It was among around 85% of nations to miss the 2024 deadline for submitting a new UN nature plan, known as a national biodiversity strategy and action plan (NBSAP), according to a joint investigation by Carbon Brief and the Guardian.

On 29 December 2025, Brazil finally published its new NBSAP, following a lengthy consultation process involving hundreds of scientists, Indigenous peoples and civil society members.

The NBSAP details how the country will meet the goals and targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), the landmark deal often described as the “Paris Agreement” for nature, agreed in 2022. 

Below, Carbon Brief walks through six key takeaways from Brazil’s belated NBSAP:

1. The government plans to ‘conserve’ 80% of the Brazilian Amazon by 2030
2. It plans to ‘eliminate’ deforestation in Brazilian ecosystems by 2030
3. Brazil has ‘aligned’ its actions on tackling climate change and biodiversity loss
4. The country seeks to ‘substantially increase’ nature finance from a range of sources
5. Brazil’s plans for agriculture include ‘sustainable intensification’
6. Brazil conducted a largest-of-its-kind consultation process before releasing its NBSAP

The government plans to ‘conserve’ 80% of the Brazilian Amazon by 2030

The third target of the GBF sets out the aim that “by 2030 at least 30% of terrestrial, inland water and of coastal and marine areas…are effectively conserved and managed”. This is often referred to as “30 by 30”.  

Previous analysis by Carbon Brief and the Guardian found that more than half of countries’ pledges were not aligned with this aim. (Importantly, all of the GBF’s targets are global ones and do not prescribe the amount of land that each country must protect.)

Brazil’s NBSAP sets a substantially higher goal – it seeks to conserve 80% of the Amazon rainforest within its borders, as well as 30% of the country’s other ecosystems.

Since Brazil is one of the largest countries in the world, in addition to being the most biodiverse, this higher target represents a significant step towards achieving the global target.

For the purposes of its protected areas target, Brazil considers not just nationally designated protected areas, but also the lands of Indigenous peoples, Quilombola territories and other local communities.

As the NBSAP notes, Brazil has already taken several steps towards achieving the “30 by 30” target.

In 2018, the country created or expanded four marine protected areas in its territorial waters, increasing its protected area coverage from around 1.5% to greater than 25%. 

According to Brazil’s sixth national report, submitted to the CBD in 2020, 18% of the country’s “continental area” – that is, its land and inland waters – was part of a protected area. More than 28% of the Amazon received such a designation. 

A further 12% of the country is demarcated as Indigenous lands, which “provide important protection to a large territorial extension of the country, particularly in the Amazon biome”, the report says.

The action plan that accompanies the new NBSAP sets out 15 actions in support of achieving target three, including recognising and titling Indigenous lands, establishing ecological corridors and biosphere reserves and implementing national strategies for mangrove, coral reef and wetlands protection.

It plans to ‘eliminate’ deforestation in Brazilian ecosystems by 2030

As well as committing to the GBF targets of protecting and restoring ecosystems, Brazil’s NBSAP also sets a separate target to “eliminate” deforestation in Brazilian biomes by 2030.

Target 1B of Brazil’s NBSAP says that the country aims to “achieve zero deforestation and conversion of native vegetation by 2030”.

The country hopes to achieve this “through the elimination of illegal deforestation and conversion, compensation for the legal suppression of native vegetation, prevention and control of wildfires, combating desertification and attaining land degradation neutrality”.

This goes above and beyond what is set out in the GBF, which does not mention “deforestation” at all.

Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was reelected as leader in 2022 on a promise to achieve “zero deforestation”, following a rise in Amazon destruction under his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.

Data from Global Forest Watch (GFW), an independent satellite research platform, found that deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell by a “dramatic” 36% in 2023 under Lula.

However, Brazil remains the world’s largest deforester. Separate GFW data shows that the country accounted for 42% of all primary forest loss in 2024 – with two-thirds of this driven by wildfires fuelled by a record drought.

Brazil has ‘aligned’ its actions on tackling climate change and biodiversity loss

Brazil’s NBSAP comes shortly after it hosted the COP30 climate summit in the Amazon city of Belém in November.

One of the presidency’s priorities at the talks was to bring about greater coordination between global efforts to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss.

At the Rio Earth summit in 1992, the world decided to address Earth’s most pressing environmental problems under three separate conventions: one on climate change, one on biodiversity and the final one on land desertification.

But, for the past few years, a growing number of scientists, politicians and diplomats have questioned whether tackling these issues separately is the right approach.

And, at the most recent biodiversity and land desertification COPs, countries agreed to new texts calling for closer cooperation between the three Rio conventions. 

At COP30, the Brazilian presidency attempted to negotiate a new text to enhance “synergies” between the conventions. However, several nations, including Saudi Arabia, vocally opposed the progression of a substantive outcome.

Following on from this, Brazil’s NBSAP states that its vision for tackling nature loss is “aligned” with its UN climate plan, known as a nationally determined contribution (NDC).

In addition, the NBSAP states that Brazil is taking a “holistic approach to addressing the existing crises of climate change and biodiversity loss in a synergistic manner”.

It lists several targets that could help to address both environmental problems, including ending deforestation, promoting sustainable agriculture and restoring ecosystems.

Brazil joins a small number of countries, including Panama and the UK, that have taken steps to bring their actions to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss into alignment.

The country seeks to ‘substantially increase’ nature finance from a range of sources

According to target 19 of the NBSAP, the Brazilian government will “develop and initiate” a national strategy to finance the actions laid out in the document by the end of 2026.

This financial plan “should aim to substantially increase…the volume of financial resources” for implementing the NBSAP.

These resources should come in the form of federal, state and municipal funding, international finance, private funding and incentives for preserving biodiversity, the document continues.

The accompanying action plan includes a number of specific mechanisms, which could be used to finance efforts to tackle nature loss. These include biodiversity credits, a regulated carbon market and the Tropical Forest Forever Facility.

Separately, the NBSAP sets out a goal in target 18 of identifying “subsidies and economic and fiscal incentives that are directly harmful to biodiversity” by the end of this year. Those identified subsidies should then be reduced or eliminated by 2030, it adds.

The document notes that the phaseout of harmful subsidies should be accompanied by an increase in incentives for “conservation, restoration and sustainable use of biodiversity”.

The NBSAP does “important work” in translating the targets of the GBF into “ambitious targets” in the national context, says Oscar Soria, co-founder and chief executive of civil-society organisation the Common Initiative. 

Soria tells Carbon Brief:

“While the document is laudable on many aspects and its implementation would change things for the better, the concrete financial means to make it a reality – funding it and halting the funding of activities going against it – are still lacking. In this regard, this NBSAP is a good example of the GBF’s problem at the global level.

“The hardest part of political negotiations will begin only now: in 2026, the Brazilian government will have to evaluate the cost of implementing the NBSAP and where finance will come from.”

Brazil’s plans for agriculture include ‘sustainable intensification’

Brazil is one of the world’s leading food producers, meeting 10% of global demand, according to its NBSAP.

It is also the world’s largest grower of soya beans and the second-largest cattle producer.

However, agriculture is also a major driver of biodiversity loss in Brazil, largely due to the clearing of rainforest or other lands for soya growing and cattle ranching. Agriculture itself is also affected by biodiversity loss, particularly the loss of pollinators. The NBSAP says:

“Biodiversity loss directly undermines agricultural production and human well-being, demonstrating that agriculture, other productive activities and biodiversity conservation are interdependent rather than antagonistic.”

Brazil’s NBSAP addresses sustainable agriculture in target 10A, which aims to “ensure that, by 2030, areas under agriculture, livestock, aquaculture and forestry are managed sustainably and integrated into the landscape”.

It lists several approaches to achieving sustainable production, including agroecology, regenerative agriculture and sustainable intensification.

Targets seven and 10B also pertain to food systems. Target seven seeks to reduce the impacts of pollution, including nutrient loss and pesticides, on biodiversity, while target 10B commits to the sustainable fishing and harvesting of other aquatic resources.

In 2021, Brazil launched its national low-carbon agriculture strategy, known as the ABC+ plan. The plan promotes sustainability in the agricultural sector through both adaptation and mitigation actions. 

Brazil conducted a largest-of-its-kind consultation process before releasing its NBSAP

Brazil was among the majority of nations to miss the UN deadline to submit a new NBSAP before the COP16 biodiversity summit in Colombia in October 2024.

At the time, a representative from the Brazilian government said that it was unable to meet the deadline because it was embarking on an ambitious consultation process for its NBSAP.

Braulio Dias, director of biodiversity conservation at the Brazilian Ministry of Environment, who is responsible for the NBSAP process, told Carbon Brief and the Guardian in 2024:

“Brazil is a huge country with the largest share of biodiversity [and] a large population with a complex governance. We are a federation with 26 states and 5,570 municipalities. We started the process to update our NBSAP in May last year and have managed to conclude a broad consultation process involving over a thousand people in face-to-face meetings.

“We are in the process of consolidating all proposals received, consulting all the departments of the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, all the federal ministries and agencies engaged in the biodiversity agenda and the National Biodiversity Committee, before we can have a high-level political endorsement.

“Then we still have to build a monitoring strategy, a finance strategy and a communication strategy. We will only conclude this process toward the end of the year or early next year.”

In its NBSAP, the Brazilian government says it engaged with around 200 scientific and civil society organisations and 110 Indigenous representatives while preparing its NBSAP.

Around one-third of the Amazon is protected by Indigenous territories.

Indigenous peoples in Brazil have continuously called for more inclusion in UN processes to tackle climate change and nature loss, including by holding multiple demonstrations during the COP30 climate summit in November.

Michel Santos, public policy manager at WWF Brazil, says that many in Brazil’s civil society were pleased with the NBSAP’s extensive consultation process, telling Carbon Brief:

“Brazilian civil society is very happy with everything. It was a long process with broad participation. It took a while to be completed, but we consider the result quite satisfactory.”

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The post Brazil’s biodiversity pledge: Six key takeaways for nature and climate change appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Brazil’s biodiversity pledge: Six key takeaways for nature and climate change

Two years after governments agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems, a series of conferences and consultations in 2026 will move the conversation on to how the transition should be carried out in a fair and orderly way, according to those leading key international processes.

On Thursday, Climate Home News hosted an event with former German climate envoy Jennifer Morgan, the Brazilian COP30 presidency’s chief strategy officer Tulio Andrade, Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative director Alex Rafalowicz and Natural Resource Governance Institute programme director Erica Westenberg.

The speakers discussed the first international conference on a just transition away from fossil fuels – taking place in the Colombian city of Santa Marta on April 28-29 – and the announcement at COP30 that the Brazilian presidency should consult on and draw up a global roadmap away from fossil fuels.

Morgan, Andrade and Rafalowicz said these were opportunities for many different political, economic and social groups – ranging from Indigenous Peoples and diplomats to those involved in finance and infrastructure – to get involved in designing the transition away from fossil fuels.

Andrade did not give details on the roadmap’s timeline, but said it would reflect that shifting off fossil fuels is not just a “climate imperative but actually something that is going to determine planning and stability from a much wider perspective that goes from financial stability, from social stability, from economic stability”.

He added that planning is needed to transition workers and to avoid disruption as the financial systems of fossil fuel-exporting countries are “still reliant on the legacy of petrodollars and the liquidity they gave”. Rafalowicz noted that price stability for consumers and access to energy for those without it are other important issues to address.

Morgan said governments could put the COP30 presidency’s promised roadmap on the official agenda for the mid-year climate talks in Bonn in June or at COP31 in November. She added that financial institutions and governments should draw up their own roadmaps for moving away from fossil fuels because “a roadmap is a course, it’s a process, it’s a multifaceted thing – it’s not just one single roadmap”.

Santa Marta conference

Rafalowicz, whose campaign group is supporting the Colombian and Dutch governments in organising the Santa Marta conference, said it would be a venue for participants to discuss the enabling conditions needed for phasing down fossil fuel production and use. The governments of Pacific island nations Tuvalu and Vanuatu have offered to hold a follow-up conference, he added.

Alongside the official conference, there will be events run by civil society around Santa Marta’s University of Magdalena, he said. The public university has a long history of exploring the challenge in question because the province of Magdalena is a major fossil fuel producer, he said. There’s also “a very strong local Indigenous population that has a lot of experience with both the harms of fossil fuel extraction, but also trying to manage the transition to the new economy”.

Rafalowicz added that the event’s organisers intend to produce a chair’s summary which can feed back into the official UN climate talks. At COP30, the Brazilian presidency officially welcomed the conference and Andrade told the webinar its conclusions should be “integrated” into COP discussions.

The Brazilian official said that a “Global Implementation Accelerator” (GIA) agreed at COP30 should aim for positive tipping points in climate action as “perhaps the only way” that governments can limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. Currently scientists expect that limit to be breached on a long-term basis by the end of the decade but say temperatures can be brought back down below it again.

Andrade said the GIA could focus on high-impact measures that can serve as an “emergency brake” on global warming like cutting emissions of methane and non-carbon dioxide gases, ecosystem restoration, early warning for climate disasters and building state capacities.

High-carbon exports harm sovereignty

Speaking in Spanish on a separate webinar on Thursday, Colombia‘s Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development Irene Vélez Torres said her government is trying to replace industries that extract natural resources with productive industries based on “life”, like tourism.

She said Colombia’s strategy was “very different from Venezuela” and partly motivated by what she called Venezuela’s “mistake” in the 2000s of not acting to curb extractivism and dependence on fossil fuels.

“Part of the struggle for sovereignty in the south of the [American] continent has to do with overcoming extractivism,” she said. “We are more sovereign if we are less dependent on exports that are carbon-intensive.”

The post Roadmaps and Colombia conference aim to shift fossil fuel transition into higher gear appeared first on Climate Home News.

Roadmaps and Colombia conference aim to shift fossil fuel transition into higher gear

As competition for natural resources fractures the global order, Saudi Arabia is cementing its position as the centre of gravity for international discussions to accelerate the production of minerals the world needs for clean energy and digital technologies.

Ministers and senior representatives from more than 100 countries gathered in Riyadh this week for the Future Minerals Forum, an annual event that has become a mainstay of the minerals industry’s calendar since its launch in 2022.

Among them were representatives from all G20 countries, which include the US, Canada, China, Germany, France and Russia, as well resource-rich African and Latin American nations, the Saudi government said.

The fast-expanding forum has been a tour de force in helping position oil and mineral-rich Saudi Arabia at the heart of the conversation to step up production of minerals at a time when competition for resources is dominating global politics.

President Donald Trump has made control over natural resources and access to critical minerals a core tenet of the US’s national security strategy as it seeks to curb China’s dominance over mineral supply chains. In a massive disruption to the global order, Washington has deployed forces to seize Venezuelan oil, both physically from sanctioned tankers and indirectly by deposing its leader, and is making a play to acquire mineral-rich Greenland from fellow NATO-member Denmark.

“The reality is that we are in the middle of what is happening in the world,” Adel Al-Jubeir, Saudi Arabia’s minister of state for foreign affairs, told the minerals conference.

“Our objective is not to seek more territory or more people or more minerals,” he said. “Our objective is stability and calm so that we can focus on resources and building a better future.”

A global decision-shaping platform

The world’s second-largest oil producer, Saudi Arabia sits on minerals worth an estimated $2.5 trillion – including lithium, rare earths, zinc and copper – all of which are needed to manufacture batteries and other clean energy technologies.

Under its Vision 2030 development plan, Saudi Arabia has made mining a key pillar for diversifying its economy away from fossil fuels and is investing its oil revenues into becoming a hub for processing and trading minerals.

“There’s only one [country] – that’s the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – that has the trust of enough countries to convene at this critical time,” said Scott Brison, vice-chair of BMO Wealth Management, whose banking arm specialises in the metals and mining sector.

“This [forum], in a very short time, has become the Davos of mining,” he added.

Like the famed Swiss ski resort, which will host the annual World Economic Forum next week, the Future Minerals Forum has become a must-attend annual event for investors and decision-makers, who seek to broker deals and invest in mineral value chains.

Saudi Arabia’s minister of industry and mineral resources, Bandar bin Ibrahim Al-Khorayef, described the event as “a global decision-shaping platform” that “influences policies, mobilise[s] investment and build[s] collaboration across the entire mineral value chain”.

It comes just weeks after Saudi Arabia opposed any discussion of possible binding rules at the UN to limit the environmental harm caused by mining and make supply chains more transparent.

US pitch for partners

The forum focused on the challenges of meeting rapidly-rising demand for minerals, driven by the roll-out of clean energy technologies and AI infrastructure, amid funding gaps and political uncertainty.

Industry leaders agreed that Saudi Arabia’s geographic location, mineral wealth, extensive relations with both the West and China – originally built on fossil fuel exports – and vast amounts of cheap energy make the Kingdom well-placed to become a global minerals processing hub.

Amid geopolitical tensions, “the Kingdom has the ability to be a neutral processor” and supply the US market, said José Luis Manzano, chairman of private investment group Integra Capital.

The US and Saudi Arabia have already agreed to co-operate on mineral supply chains, with the US government pledging to finance a new rare earths refinery in the country.

Earlier this week, Trump signed an executive order calling for “agreements with foreign trading partners” to help reduce US dependence on China.

Addressing the Riyadh conference, Audrey Robertson, the US assistant secretary for critical minerals and energy innovation, defended President Trump’s approach to securing mineral supplies from resource-rich countries, insisting the US “seeks to have great partnerships where we all bring different things to the table”.

“There’s no strong-arming, there’s only strategic alliances to better our nations and better the world,” she said. Yet, when it comes to Greenland, she warned: “I would take our president at his word.”

Riyadh pledges to break with old ways

Delegates also discussed improving the transparency of mineral supply chains and ensuring that local communities endowed with mineral wealth benefit from their extraction.

Saudi minister of state for foreign affairs Al-Jubeir said the “old ways” that saw “foreign companies come in, mine, exploit, take all the value outside of the country and leave the host country with nothing but a big hole on its territory” had to change.

“The new view is we need to invest. We need to keep as much of the value chain as we can in-country so that we produce jobs [and] opportunities, which in turn produce stability, which in turn helps all of us around the world.”

At the same time, to establish itself as a minerals processing hub, Saudi Arabia is seeking to broker bilateral deals with developing countries, particularly in Africa, to secure access to resources it can refine.

Several ministers from mineral-rich African nations, including Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, Ghana, Mauritania and Morocco, attended the conference.

Riyadh is also working with the World Bank on funding opportunities for seven planned infrastructure corridors to accelerate minerals development in Africa and Latin America and help get resources to the market.

Saudi strategy stirs Africa tensions

Nonetheless, Nafi Quarshie, Africa director of the Natural Resource Governance Institute, who attended the forum, told Climate Home News there is “tension” between Saudi Arabia’s plan to process minerals and African nations’ ambitions to add value to their resources and reduce exports of raw materials.

“There’s a kind of a push for Africa to do business with Saudi Arabia,” she said.

It remains unclear how African governments can ensure that any minerals agreement with Saudi Arabia creates a win-win situation and helps drive investment to refine ores into higher-value products for clean technologies on the continent, she added.

There were few civil society representatives in the glitzy halls of the King Abdulaziz International Conference Center, while communities impacted by mining projects were not represented.

Yet, if Saudi Arabia is serious about doing things differently, activists and affected peoples need to be included in the forum to put transparency, human rights and environment protection at the core of the discussions, said Quarshie.

The post At ‘Davos of mining’, Saudi Arabia shapes new narrative on minerals appeared first on Climate Home News.

At ‘Davos of mining’, Saudi Arabia shapes new narrative on minerals