Three Years of Amazonia Forever: Generating Impact on the Ground

Flowing from the Andes in Peru, the Amazon crosses tropical rainforests, floodplains, cities, schools, and Indigenous territories, passing beneath palafita houses, watering crops, and carrying people, products, and animals before reaching the Atlantic. Along its course, the river connects people, cities, and trade across a continent-sized mosaic of cultures and nature spanning eight countries and marked by unparalleled ecological and biological diversity.

Across this diversity, Amazonian countries share many of the same opportunities and challenges, yet their national priorities differ. The challenge is therefore to align national agendas with regional solutions.

The Amazonia Forever program was launched three years ago precisely in response to these challenges, following a mandate from Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Group governors representing seven Amazonian countries.

As a regional coordination platform, Amazonia Forever brings together governments, the private sector, multilateral development banks, civil society organizations, and local communities to advance sustainable and inclusive development across the Amazon region.

A New Model for Regional Coordination

The program introduced a regional coordination model connecting financing, knowledge, partnerships, business development, and implementation across the countries of the basin. 

This integrated approach offers a new pathway for sustainable and resilient development. Its main innovation lies not in treating Amazonia as a single, uniform territory, but in recognizing its complexity, diversity, and interdependence as part of a broader system. National priorities remain central, while regional cooperation helps countries respond to shared risks, align investments, exchange knowledge, and extend the reach of solutions developed within individual territories.

Turning Coordination into Action

Three years on, this regional framework has grown considerably. Amazonia Forever now comprises more than US$5 billion in funding for over 300 public and private projects in execution or in the pipeline, while 15 donor partners have committed US$1.6 billion in resources for work in Amazonia.

The program also coordinates and supports more than 180 organizations through 10 regional networks spanning finance, public policy, research, resilient infrastructure, education, and the environment. These networks help translate regional coordination into practical action by supporting collaborative initiatives, strengthening policy dialogue among Amazonian countries, and mobilizing new partnerships and financing opportunities.

The significance of these numbers lies not only in scale, but in the connections being created between stakeholders, institutions, and resources. Previously, these groups often operated on separate tracks and synergies were not always realized. By bringing them together around shared regional priorities, Amazonia Forever is helping create the conditions for a more coordinated, effective, and lasting impact across the region.

From Financial Innovation to Measurable Impact

With this regional architecture in place, the next challenge is to translate scale, coordination, and financial innovation into measurable improvements across Amazonian territories. This means moving beyond the mobilization of resources and partnerships to assess how investments are contributing to more resilient economies, stronger institutions, sustainable livelihoods, and better outcomes for communities.

Since its establishment in 2023, Amazonia Forever has established the Network of Ministers of Finance and Planning of Amazonian Countries and supported the creation of the Green Coalition for the Amazon, bringing together public development banks to coordinate sustainable investments in the territory.

Amazonia Forever has continued to expand its financial ecosystem, strengthening regional coordination while mobilizing resources to support its five pillars:

1.    Combating Deforestation

2.    Bioeconomy and Creative Economy

3.    People and adequate access to quality education, healthcare and employment

4.    Cities, Connectivity and Resilient Infrastructure

5.    Sustainable Low-carbon Agriculture, Livestock and Forestry

From the outset, the program recognized that sustainable development at scale would require a regional financial architecture capable of connecting capital, institutions, markets and territories. What makes the last three years distinctive is not any single instrument, but the deliberate use of many. 

The program offers innovative financing to expand the flow of resources to support sustainable projects in the Amazon. These efforts include combined capital market instruments with guarantees and balance-sheet innovation, blended and concessional finance, and markets and debt innovation.

Connecting Institutions and Territories

Finance is a critical enabler of change, but lasting transformation also depends on other factors.

Amazonia spans 8 million sq km and is home to more than 50 million people, more than 70% of them living in cities. This vast scale and territorial diversity mean that, while national policies remain essential, regional cooperation can make them considerably more effective.

This is particularly evident in areas where challenges cross national borders. Monitoring systems become more effective when countries share information, while coordinated responses can strengthen preparedness for fires, droughts, and extreme weather events. Similarly, sustainable value chains can become more competitive when standards, logistics, and market conditions are better aligned across countries.

From Territorial Intelligence to Local Participation

One of Amazonia Forever's significant non-financial contributions is AmazoniaForever360+, a pan-Amazonian territorial intelligence platform launched in 2025. It brings together more than 140 public georeferenced indicators from reputable sources across the eight countries of Amazonia, in a single intuitive interface that lets non-specialist users access territorial data and intelligence easily.

To strengthen territorial collaboration, Amazonia Forever established 10 pan-Amazonian networks that generate opportunities for dialogue, co-creation, knowledge sharing, and collective action. These networks bring together governments, public and private financial institutions, businesses, research organizations, territorial actors, indigenous groups, and international partners to address shared challenges and seize opportunities that no single institution can tackle alone. By creating spaces where these different stakeholders can meet and interact, it is possible to build a more balanced understanding of challenges and opportunities, helping to ensure that solutions are both locally grounded and scalable across the region.

Regional cooperation must include the people who live in and manage Amazonian territories. Through mechanisms of direct access to funding for indigenous organizations, such as the Amazonia for Life Fund, and the program’s external Advisory Panel, Amazonia Forever has expanded the participation of Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant populations, traditional communities, civil society, academia, and the region’s private sector.

The principle is that territorial knowledge should help shape priorities and project design from the outset, rather than only being considered afterwards. Territorial intelligence can help to determine how problems are understood, how solutions and investments are designed, and how results are measured.

Turning Natural Capital into Opportunity

The same regional approach is essential when considering the potential of the region’s natural capital. Across Amazonia, multiple actors are developing products and services linked to biodiversity, food, landscape restoration, sustainable forestry, tourism, cosmetics, and technology.

The main constraint is not a lack of knowledge or potential, but the ecosystem needed to move from local pilots to sustainable scale. This requires appropriate finance, logistics, research, traceability, skills, market access, and supportive policies.

Private investment will be essential, but success cannot be measured only by the amount of capital mobilized. Investment must strengthen legitimate enterprises, conserve ecosystems, improve governance, and retain more economic value within Amazonian communities.

The objective is to build sustainable economic models that generate prosperity while preserving ecosystems and breaking away from the boom-and-bust cycles that have long shaped Amazonia’s development.

Looking Ahead: From Building to Delivering

Amazonia Forever’s first three years focused on building the foundations for country-led and regional action through financial instruments, partnerships, networks, knowledge, and institutional capacity.

With those foundations in place, the next phase is about turning them into measurable impact: more resilient infrastructure, faster disaster response, stronger institutions, sustainable businesses and employment, better access to services, improved security systems, and greater community participation.

Delivering those results, in turn, will require a stronger private sector role and closer coordination across the IDB Group, comprising the IDB, IDB Invest, and IDB Lab, to create new markets and business models, support inclusive growth, and develop more sustainable ways of financing the conservation and protection of Amazonia’s natural capital.

Looking ahead, Amazonia Forever will continue to mobilize resources, strengthen partnerships with national and local governments, deepen private sector engagement, and support the people and institutions closest to the territory, recognizing that lasting change depends on their leadership and participation.