BNDES promises to invest with a focus on social and environmental infrastructure

Transform Brazil into a green power. With this objective in the near horizon, the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES) organized today (11) the Brazilian Ambition Conference: Infrastructure and Climate Transition. Entrepreneurs, representatives of industry and the financial, energy and infrastructure sectors, as well as researchers, participated in the debates.

One of the main challenges pointed out at the event was to balance economic growth with the reduction of pollutants and the sustainable use of the country’s natural resources. The director of Planning and Structuring of Projects at the BNDES, Nelson Barbosa, said that the bank’s development policies will follow this path, in line with the investment plans foreseen by the federal government for the coming months.

“There will be more social and environmental infrastructure – energy efficiency, emission reduction, decarbonization, concessions or PPPs for forest management, recovery of degraded areas, urban transport and sanitation”, he explained.

The president of BNDES, Aloizio Mercadante, reinforced the commitment to invest in projects that modernize the Brazilian productive sector and said that the increase in the number of disbursements and financing in 2023 indicates this.

“We will overcome next month all the investment in infrastructure made last year. Brazil has no more time to lose to reindustrialize itself and to modernize its productive structure to advance in infrastructure”, said Mercadante.

“The BNDES of the future has arrived: it is green, digital, innovative, inclusive, reindustrializing; look at the infrastructure and see the public-private partnership as the most promising path for Brazil to return to accelerated growth”, she observed.

During one of the event’s panels, Isabella Teixeira, former Minister of the Environment and member of the board of directors of the BNDES, pointed out the bank’s role in the climate agenda, as an inducer and structuring of new paths. And she also demanded changes in public environmental management from the country’s authorities.

“Brazil does not make political pacts very well. We need to make climate agreements. Africa has a strategic mineral plan, a green plan. We have nothing. We have a genetic arrogance of thinking that we are leaders in biodiversity, that we have many alternatives. But we do not turn this into assets, or into wealth or innovative political speeches”, said the former minister.