Dear partners and clients,
With the end of 2021 and the arrival of 2022, I wanted to share Biofílica’s progress and expectations for the upcoming year. As in 2020, we went through a complex year, with the pandemic demanding resilience and adaptability. But 2021 was also a year of great achievements for us.
Biofílica in 2021
This year we became Biofílica Ambipar Environment after joining the Ambipar Group. With this union we will accelerate our growth, providing new solutions to our clients and amplifying our portfolio of environmental services of the largest Environmental Management company in Brazil.
2021 was a year of growth for Biofílica. We integrated a new team and expanded our own. We more than doubled our team, which had 13 employees in January and now represents a team of more than 30 excellent professionals. We added an area focused only on technology, which started the work of implementing the Biofílica Platform, a robust tool to manage our projects and also build a digital real estate for our Legal Reserve Compensation (LRC) area and provide other environmental services.
Within our LRC area, we more than doubled the number of hectares of contracts we negotiated. This was in part due to advances in the implementation of the Brazilian Forest Code, which had December 31, 2020 as the cut-off date for the rural owner to register their property in the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR), with the possibility of carrying out the Environmental Regularization Program (PRA) to receive all the benefits provided for within the legislation. In 2021, we also had the launch of the Environmental Regularization Module, a tool that allows the owner to insert their project within the Environmental Regularization Program (PRA), including primarily their proposed Legal Reserve Compensation area.
We also expanded our purpose – what began with REDD+ conservation projects in the Amazon now represents a part of our portfolio of Nature-based Solutions (NbS). In 2021, we started our first forest restoration project in partnership with the Institute of Ecological Research (IPÊ), the Corridors for Life Project. We started planting the first 500 hectares and we hope to reach the mark of 30,000 hectares in the first 10 years. In addition to including AR (Afforestation/Reforestation) projects in our portfolio, together with Minerva Foods we took on the challenge of developing the first carbon project focused on livestock supply chain management in Brazil. Soon we will also start our first conservation and restoration of coastal and marine ecosystems projects, or Blue Carbon.
In 2021 we also started two new REDD+ projects that will be verified in 2022, the REDD+ Jutaituba Project and the REDD+ Agropalma Project. We saw important advances with the verification audits of two projects, REDD+ RESEX Jacundá and REDD+ Manoa, which combined should bring over 1 million carbon credits to market.
With our REDD+ projects alone, we finished the year with 1.7 million hectares of forest under conservation, representing, on average, 2 million tons of carbon dioxide that are prevented from being emitted into the atmosphere every year.
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A unified vision
Our growth was only possible because we have partners and customers who share the same vision of the future as us, who are hands on and implement actions, projects and programs aimed at a sustainable development. This year, we saw a record number of companies that have committed to being Net Zero by 2050. We observed this commitment personally, with over 100 customers offsetting their emissions with us. Compared to 2020, we saw a growth of more than 65% in our sales of REDD+ carbon credits, and a total increase of 187% in the volume of carbon credits transacted from partners, with biogas and renewable energy projects.
We also saw a reaffirmation of global commitments to mitigate climate change. Biofílica personally accompanied COP26, which finalized the Paris Agreement Rulebook. What was already clear within the voluntary market has now been formalized globally: carbon markets are essential tools for international cooperation acts that seek to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.
2021 was also a year of great collaboration, with partners working together to provide an increasingly transparent, reliable and robust market. This year we co-founded the NBS Brazil Alliance, which brings together the largest group of carbon project developers in Brazil. We also became strategic supporters of Ecosystem Marketplace, a global platform providing information on finance, markets and payments for environmental services.
We launched a Guide for Responsible Purchasing of REDD+ Credits in Brazil, contributed with our views together with the Brazil Coalition and were invited by Verra to integrate the team of authors of the Voluntary Carbon Market Global Dialogue. It was a year of great partnerships and many achievements.
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A 2022 of a lot of action
This year, we want to continue moving forward with our main goal: to become the largest Nature-based Solutions company in the world. We hope to continue to implement new solutions, increase our team, expand our scope to projects in other South American countries and transact a new record volume of carbon credits.
That being said, I conclude with a special thank you to Biofílica’s team and Board, customers and partners for completing yet another cycle together and for making all these achievements possible. We still have a long way ahead of us, but we are counting on having all of you by our side to continue making a difference in Brazil and the world.
I wish everyone an excellent 2022 and that our hopes and strengths can be renewed to face another year of new challenges, growth and co-evolution.
A virtual hug,
Plínio Ribeiro
CEO and Co-founder
Biofílica Ambipar Environment
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