The company Mercado Livre announced on 09/03 a new program for the regeneration and conservation of biomes in regions where the e-commerce giant operates. The Regenera América project, which should initially support two projects in the Atlantic Forest region in partnership with The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the Ecological Research Institute (IPÊ) and the startup Pachama, covers initiatives such as planting trees, regenerating biological corridors and preservation of hydrographic basins.
Based on these first two projects, the program expects to restore more than 3 thousand hectares of forest in 2021. For this purpose, the Conservador da Mantiqueira initiatives, in partnership with TNC, and Corridors For Life, together with IPÊ, will act to preserve the region’s biodiversity, maintaining ecosystem services generated from conservation, such as healthy soils, food, raw materials and drinking water. With the advancement of the program, Mercado Livre intends to expand its actions to other main biomes in Latin America, from the Brazilian Amazon to Mexico, regions that are home to a quarter of the planet’s biodiversity.
“As a company, the goal is to reduce our environmental impact and create actions to mitigate this. For this reason, Regenera Amérca is the first step in terms of reforestation and conservation while designing an even greater global strategy”, said Pedro Arnt, CFO of Mercado Livre, during the company’s announcement at an online event.
For the development of the project, the company foresees an initial investment of R$ 45 million that will be invested in the first two actions this year. According to Pedro Arnt, the value was calculated proportionally based on the carbon footprint generated by the Free Market in 2020 across Latin America.
“It is essential that these initial projects take off in order to generate carbon credits for the next 15 or 20 years. In addition, we hope that these projects will be important for the communities and companies that inhabit these biomes”, said Arnt.
Main actions
Among the outstanding actions are the Conservative Project of Mantiqueira, which will restore 2,700 hectares spread over small and medium-sized properties in the Serra da Mantiqueira region. Corridors For Life will create forest corridors between remaining areas of native forest by planting 1 million trees in degraded areas, restoring 300 hectares. In addition, the program will have the support of the Argentine startup Pachama, which uses artificial intelligence and satellite data to monitor forests.
Época Negócios. Published on 09/03/2021.
