In 2018, Vale announced , in collaboration with the UN agenda, including to protect and restore 500,000 hectares of areas beyond its sites. This voluntary forest commitment is one of the most robust in the mining sector and it will contribute to another of the company’s objectives, to become carbon neutral by 2050.
Vale’s forest commitment involves 500,000 hectares: conservation of 400,000 hectares of forest and restoration of 100,000 hectares of degraded areas through Fundo Vale, a network of partners and positive social and environmental impact business arrangements. This work will generate income and jobs while helping restore biomes, which in turn will sequester carbon from the atmosphere during the growth phase of trees. The objective is to strengthen the regenerative business environment, permitting scale gains in more sustainable production chains and positive social and environmental impacts.
Patrícia Daros, Director of Operations, Fundo Vale
Fundo Vale’s involvement with Vale’s 2030 forest commitment was designed in accordance with the experience it has gained since 2016, with the support of consulting firm Impacto Plus, which focuses on studying innovative solutions for restoring degraded areas through agroforestry systems. Proposals were piloted in the LabSaf initiative, in partnership with Conexsus, and 10 hectares of experimental planting was enabled in 2019, led by Belterra and Caaporã, informal initiatives that have already demonstrated the potential to be scaled up and replicated elsewhere.
In practice, the idea is to develop and strengthen productive arrangements, emphasizing agroforestry systems, and to create financial instruments that can unlock access to resources and markets for impact businesses that value intact forests and restoration, making production chains more sustainable. This also means catalyzing hybrid investment operations, leveraging public, private and philanthropic financial resources for these businesses, and building arrangements involving market offtakers. This will allow large-scale environmental restoration and conservation.
The company plans to invest at least US$2 billion to reduce its direct and indirect carbon emissions (scopes 1 and 2) by 33% by 2030, compared to its emissions in 2017. It will also help reduce its suppliers’ emissions (scope 3) by 15% by 2035, compared to their emissions in 2018. This is the biggest investment to fight climate change ever pledged by the mining industry.
Fundo Vale has already begun a feasibility study for the generation of forest carbon credits by reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, linking the forest component to its climate change commitments. The idea is to test the feasibility of creating carbon credits, combining sustainable resource extraction or management with forest conservation, preventing deforestation and generating income through social and biological diversity businesses. We call this “impact carbon.” Thus, in future, Vale could use these credits in a complementary way in its carbon neutralization strategy.
“We are also studying initiatives to strengthen reductions in emissions from avoided deforestation, such as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), in addition to other ecosystem services that can be scaled up through partnerships with public, private and civil society agents. The idea is to encourage the preservation of forests, especially in the Amazon, offering financial incentives through forest carbon credits at fair prices to local populations, combating illegal deforestation and encouraging the bioeconomy.”
Gustavo Luz, Fundo Vale & Equity Stakes Manager