Today (January 30), Fundo Vale and Quintessa, an impact accelerator, are launching the Forest & Climate Challenges Program – Carbon Edition, which will accelerate up to six innovative initiatives with the potential to solve challenges in the forest carbon chain. The program aims to promote carbon generation businesses, whose operations reconcile biodiversity preservation and the promotion of sustainable development by generating social co-benefits for the communities involved. To sign up for the challenge, interested parties must go to desafiosflorestaeclima.com.br. Applications are open until February 16, 2023.

“Fundo Vale seeks to contribute to strengthening the high-integrity forest carbon market, reducing carbon emissions and above all yielding benefits for those who live in the forest and help protect it. We call this approach ‘impact carbon,’” explains Gustavo Luz, Fundo Vale’s operations manager. Fundo Vale is responsible for coordinating Vale’s 2030 Forest Goal, which involves voluntarily restoring and protecting 500,000 hectares of forests by 2030.

The selected enterprises will go through an acceleration program coordinated by Quintessa, lasting six months. The program will provide those selected with individual and personalized monitoring, as well as mentoring to support the strategic challenges of each business. The selected projects will receive a diagnosis and an acceleration plan will be delivered, based on Quintessa’s methodology, which has already been used to boost more than 400 impact startups. 

In addition, the businesses will be able to pitch themselves to executives from Fundo Vale, Vale, strategic partners, investors and supporters, and they will have access to Quintessa’s network of mentors.
    
The carbon ecosystem challenges have been broken into two broad areas: Indirect, referring to solutions that act in the agroforestry chain, indirectly impacting carbon; and Direct, involving solutions that directly generate benefits for the carbon market, throughout all the stages of a project’s development and monitoring cycle.

In the Indirect area, solutions are sought to supply inputs for agroforestry systems, provide technical training for stakeholders in the carbon chain, guarantee land tenure and use, and commercialize agroforestry products. In the Direct area, solutions are sought to monitor, manage and finance carbon credit projects, access the carbon market and reduce the risks of carbon credit projects. More details about the desired solutions can be found on the program’s website.

The contest is open to different kinds of enterprises, ranging from early-stage businesses that need support to validate their first applications to mature businesses with solutions that are ready for use and need to be adapted/produced and require support to scale up. There are no restrictions regarding the profile of initiatives. Thus, startups, businesses, organizations and cooperatives, among other types of entities, can apply. However, all the solutions must be scalable and have the prospect of being financially sustainable.
 
“We have identified many important challenges in the agroforestry chain and carbon chain. Given that just waiting is not an option, this initiative aims to accelerate those that are proposing solutions for these chains. We opted for a personalized methodology to ensure that the program is high quality and assertive, adding value for entrepreneurs, who may have solutions and businesses at either initial or more advanced stages,” says Anna de Souza Aranha, managing partner of Quintessa. 

“While making investments in new impact businesses for Vale’s 2030 Forest Goal, we realized that one of the great challenges for large-scale solutions is to unlock systemic bottlenecks for the chain as a whole. Furthermore, since we view Brazil as a potential global leader in innovation and sustainability, fostering these businesses, from the oxygenation stage through acceleration to final delivery, is a fundamental part of our purpose,” explains Gustavo Luz.
 
About Fundo Vale

Fundo Vale is a business promotion and investment fund created to generate positive social and environmental impacts. Its purpose is to promote a fairer and more inclusive economy through social and environmental impact businesses. Since 2009, it has helped build a new economic reality by investing in business development, knowledge generation and financial arrangements aimed at the conservation and recovery of biomes, paying special attention to the Amazon. Fundo Vale has so far promoted around 90 conservation and sustainable land use projects and invested more than R$210 million, mainly in the form of non-reimbursable resources. Find out more at www.fundovale.org.
 
About Quintessa 

Quintessa is an ecosystem of entrepreneurial and innovative solutions for Brazil’s most important social and environmental challenges. Since 2009, it has been promoting strategic integration between social and environmental responsibility and financial results, working together with impact business entrepreneurs, large companies, investors, institutes and foundations to promote innovation, positive impacts and ESG agendas. Quintessa has already identified and mapped more than 4,500 startups and boosted more than 400 outstanding impact startups in areas such as education, health, the environment, sustainable cities and inclusion.