The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) and The Rockefeller Foundation have agreed to invest in The Amazon Reforestation Fund managed by Mombak Gestora de Recursos Ltda.
Mombak is a venture-backed carbon removal startup investment manager focused on reforesting the Amazon. The Amazon Restoration Fund seeks to reforest Brazilian pastureland using native and biodiverse tree species to rebuild the forests of the Amazon. The additional carbon abated from the atmosphere from these new forests produces high-quality carbon removal credits. The credits are then sold globally via both spot sales and long-term customer offtake agreements.
CPP Investments allocated $30 million to the fund and another $500,000 equity investment in Mombak itself. The investment is housed in the pension system’s C$32 billion ($24 billion) Sustainable Energies group, which is active across the global energy system.
“The global economy transition is well underway, and we expect that the value of high-quality, verifiable, nature-based carbon removal credits such as the ones produced through The Amazon Reforestation Fund will continue to rise,” said Bill Rogers, managing director, global head of Sustainable Energies at CPP Investments. “This investment is consistent with our efforts to expand our investments in important and growing industries that support decarbonization while continuing to deliver long-term risk-adjusted returns for the CPP Fund.”
The Mombak investment is CPP’s third investment in vehicles that pursue scaling nature-based carbon solutions and its first in Brazilian reforestation.
The Rockefeller Foundation made a $5 million commitment to Mombak’s Amazon Reforestation Fund.
The company’s first project in Northern Brazil will plant three million trees with more than 100 native species, including 200,000 seedlings of endangered species. Over one million trees will have been planted by next month, including endangered or vulnerable species such as Cedro Rosa (Cedrela fissilis), Castanheira (Bertholletia excelsa), Itauba (Mezilaurus itauba), Mogno (Swietenia macrophylla), and others. The first project has also had a positive impact on the region, creating over 50 formal jobs in the local municipality. It is expected that Mombak will kick-off multiple additional projects of this kind before the end of 2023.
“Nature-based solutions could help reduce one-third of the necessary global emissions by the end of the decade, but remain grossly underfunded, with an estimated $700 billion financing gap per year,” said Maria Kozloski, senior vice president of Innovative Finance at The Rockefeller Foundation. “The Rockefeller Foundation is proud to help close this gap by investing in Mombak’s innovative model that seeks to remove carbon by reforesting the Amazon.”
For Mombak these investments feed into a $100 million financing to support the largest biodiverse reforestation effort for carbon removal in the region, enabling Mombak to remove carbon, improve soil quality, enhance biodiversity and create sustainable economic alternatives for local communities.
“Through an investor and customer-led product development initiative, we dedicated more than a year to meeting the most demanding specifications and requirements with respect to carbon removal, biodiversity, sustainable resource use, and interaction with local communities, among other impact indicators,” said Peter Fernandez, CEO and co-founder of Mombak, which he founded in 2021 along with Gabriel Silva, former CFO of Brazil’s first decacorn Nubank. Fernandez was the former CEO of Brazil’s first unicorn, ride-sharer 99.
