United States Department of State

Most state-owned and private sector corporations of any significant size in Brazil pursue corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. Brazil’s new CFIAs (see sections on bilateral investment agreements and dispute settlement) contain CSR provisions. Some corporations use CSR programs to meet local content requirements, particularly in information technology manufacturing. Many corporations support local education, health, and other programs in the communities where they have a presence. Brazilian consumers, especially the local residents where a corporation has or is planning to establish a local presence, generally expect CSR activity. Corporate officials frequently meet with community members prior to building a new facility to review the types of local services the corporation will commit to providing and also receive feedback. Foreign and local enterprises in Brazil often advance United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as part of their CSR activity and will cite their local contributions to SDGs such as universal primary education and environmental sustainability. Brazilian prosecutors and civil society can be very proactive in bringing cases against companies for failure to implement the requirements of the environmental licenses for their investments and operations. National and international nongovernmental organizations monitor corporate activities for perceived threats to Brazil’s biodiversity and tropical forests and can mount strong campaigns against alleged misdeeds. A common challenge for foreign businesses, especially as it relates to child and forced labor, is a lack of transparency in supply chains.

In September 2023, Brazil and the U.S. launched the Partnership for Workers’ Rights, focused on advancing workers’ rights and stop worker exploitation. The partnership includes the engagement with the private sector to promote the creation of jobs in key production chains, combat discrimination in the workplace and promote diversity.

Brazilian legislation has prohibited wage discrimination since 1943, however there are still gender pay gaps in the country across multiple industries. With the enactment of the Equal Pay Law (1.085) in 2023, companies with over 100 employees operating in Brazil are required to publish semi-annual salary transparency reports to enable objective salary comparisons. The reports aim to identify wage discrimination based on sex, race, ethnicity, origin, or age, but must also include data on the proportion of women and men in leadership roles. Failure to comply with transparency reporting can result in additional fines of up to approximately $25,000. The U.S. diplomatic mission in Brazil supports U.S. business CSR activities through the +Unidos Group (Mais Unidos), a group of multinational companies established in Brazil that supports public and private CSR alliances in Brazil. Additional information regarding this group can be found at: www.maisunidos.org .

Additional Resources

Department of State

Department of the Treasury

Department of Labor

Climate Issues

Brazil is home to 60 percent of the Amazon Basin, the single largest remaining tropical rainforest and home to the largest collection of living plant and animal species on Earth – one of every ten species in the world and one in five of all bird and fish species. Brazil’s “Legal Amazon” produces 20 percent of the world’s oxygen and 16 percent of its freshwater and is home to over 30 million people. At the same time, Brazil is the world’s sixth largest emitter of greenhouse gas (GHGs) emissions, and the largest emitter in Central and Latin America, largely due to deforestation, agriculture, and other types of land use. The impacts of climate change and extreme weather events in the Legal Amazon have significant, widespread effects for Brazil’s economy, as well as for each of its five other terrestrial biomes (Cerrado, Caatinga, Pampas, Pantanal, and Atlantic Rainforest).

Upon assuming office in January 2023, President Lula prioritized combating the climate crisis and ending deforestation in the Legal Amazon by 2030. In his first day in office, President Lula signed various environmental decrees, chief among them the reestablishment of the “Amazon Fund,” which raises donations for non-reimbursable investments in efforts to prevent, monitor, and combat deforestation, as well as to promote the preservation and sustainable use in the Brazilian Amazon. Managed by the Brazilian National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES), the Fund is viewed by the Lula government as a robust, transparent payment-for-results mechanism, with solid governance and technical-scientific rigor that directs donors toward a proven financing instrument to achieve climate objectives.

Announced at the Climate Ambition Summit in 2023, Brazil’s most updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to the Paris Agreement was approved by the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Climate Change. Returning the country’s ambition to the level of its first NDC from 2015, Brazil has pledged to reduce GHGs by 48 percent by 2025 and 53 percent by 2030 in relation to 2005 emissions. Furthermore, in 2023 Brazil reiterated its commitment to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050; that is, everything the country emits must be offset with carbon capture sources, such as forest planting, biome recovery, and other technologies.

In 2023, the 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) unanimously approved Brazil’s candidacy to host COP30 in 2025. President Lula has repeatedly stressed that hosting COP30 in the Amazonian state of Pará – the site of the country’s greatest historical rates of deforestation – will spotlight the unique needs of the biome, as well as the Federal Government’s efforts to protect the biome and its diverse peoples. Focused on the “Roadmap to Mission 1.5°C, the “COP Presidencies Troika,” a key achievement of the COP28 Presidency mandated by the UAE Consensus, united COP28 with the next two COP Presidencies – Azerbaijan and Brazil – to drive ambitious collective climate action. A recipient of the Global Fertilizer Challenge, Brazil continues to be a member of the Agricultural Innovation Mission for Climate (AIM4C), Global Methane Pledge, and myriad other climate initiatives. In a joint statement on U.S. support for the Brazilian “Ecological Transformation Plan,” Brazil announced its intent to join the United States in the First Movers Coalition, becoming the first Latin American country to pledge to help create early markets in clean technologies through policy measures and private sector engagement, with an aim to decarbonizing the hard-to-abate heavy industry and long-distance transportation.

Brazil’s “Transversal Environmental Agenda,” released on January 25, 2024, rightly commemorates the decline in deforestation rates of the Amazon in 2023 due to command-and-control efforts on the part of the current presidential administration’s Ministry of Environment (MMA). The agenda compliments the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Amazon (PPCDAm), which sets a coordinated policy across more than a dozen ministries through the end of Lula’s term in 2027. The agenda calls for boosted use of intelligence and satellite imagery to track criminal activity, regularization of land titles, and the use of a rural registry to monitor correct management of forests considered vital for slowing global climate change. The focus on the Legal Amazon has paid concrete dividends: deforestation in the legal Amazon in 2023 halved from the previous year to its lowest level since 2018. At the same time, deforestation in the neighboring Cerrado biome rose to record levels in 2023 – increasing by 43 percent from 2022.

Brazil currently has one of the highest shares of renewables globally, as renewables represent approximately 93 percent of electricity generation and 45 percent of the primary energy supply. In 2019, Brazil launched the National Biofuels Policy (RenovaBio) to comply with its Paris Agreement commitments by promoting the expansion of biofuels in the energy matrix and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The policy established annual national decarbonization targets for the fuel sector, divided into mandatory individual targets for fuel distributors. To comply with the targets, fuel distributors purchase Decarbonization Credits (CBIO), a financial asset tradable on the stock exchange since 2020 derived from the certification of the biofuel production process and that corresponds to one ton of carbon dioxide. According to the Brazilian government, the program reached 85 percent of its targets in 2021, preventing the emission of 24 million tons of greenhouse gases and trading $212 million worth of CBIOs in the stock market.

In expanding fossil fuel extraction and production, Brazil faces challenges in meeting its climate targets. Among the 20 countries with the largest developed oil reserves, Brazil currently plans to increase its gas production and develop new oil platforms on its northern seas, including at the mouth of the Amazon River.

Additional obstacles on Brazil’s path towards alignment with 1.5°C include funding barriers, missing sectoral emissions limits and targets, and a lack of guidance on how to achieve its short-term (48 percent below 2005 emission levels by 2025), medium-term (53 percent below 2005 emission levels by 2030), and long-term (net zero emissions by 2050) goals. Some core, underlying causes of deforestation include: 1) building roads in Amazonia that open vast new areas to the entry of deforestation (BR-319 and associated side roads being the prime example; 2) legalizing illegal land claims in “undesignated” government land; and 3) subsidizing the transformation of cattle pastures to soybeans, which, in practice, means soy planters buying pasture land from ranchers who then move to frontier areas where they buy much larger areas of cheap Amazon forest land and invest in deforestation.