Alicia Montalvo
Gerenta de Acción Climática y Biodiversidad Positiva de CAF
(Moderadora)
For decades, Latin America and the Caribbean has been called upon to protect its biodiversity as a global asset to be preserved for the benefit of all the planet's inhabitants. The world has seen the region as a great ecological reserve, a green lung to be watched over, whose value transcends the ecosystem services it provides to the people who depend directly on its natural resources. Countries have been asked to set ambitious conservation targets without taking into account, in most cases, the need to mobilize financial resources for this purpose and to review global regulatory frameworks that may be limiting their capacity for action. However, this narrative is changing. Today, Latin America and the Caribbean recognizes its importance as a region with solutions to climate change, both for its enormous potential to generate renewable energies and its wealth of minerals critical to the energy transition, and for its role in the sustainable production of food and the conservation of the planet's major ecosystems. It is therefore demanding its place at the international negotiating tables where major environmental challenges are debated and the enormous economic and security risks arising from poor natural resource management are addressed.
While other latitudes are working to develop costly carbon capture and storage technologies, Latin America and the Caribbean has photosynthesis - one of the most important CO2 absorption systems - in its large forest areas: in particular the Amazon rainforest, the Chaco, the Cerrado and the mangroves, which function as natural sinks. But the region's contribution to the fight against climate change goes far beyond being a mere carbon reservoir.
Latin America and the Caribbean, which today produces food for more than 1.3 billion people, has the capacity to demonstrate that it can contribute to global food security without deforesting, by transforming its agricultural systems with more productive and regenerative practices that ensure the prosperity of producers in all links of the value chain. In addition, the region plays a key role in the energy transition, not only because of its enormous potential for generating clean energy, but also because of its reserves of critical minerals that are key to the electrification of energy models (more than 65% of global lithium resources are in the region). In short, Latin America and the Caribbean plays a key role in addressing the major global challenges facing humanity today, which require the firm construction of alliances based on models that transcend extractivism and on which its trade relations have been built over the last few decades. The region wishes to reformulate its position in a complex geopolitical scenario, valuing its strategic role in providing solutions to major global problems based on sustainability, commitment to energy transition and the sustainable and productive use of its biodiversity.
The paradigm shift has become evident in recent years. In 2025, two events marked the international projection of the region. The first was the EU-CELAC Summit held in Santa Marta (Colombia), where the Latin American and Caribbean heads of state agreed on a common position for dialogue with Europe on an equal footing. The second, and perhaps more symbolic, was the holding of the COP30 on Climate Change in Belém (Brazil), in the heart of the Amazon, making it clear that it is not possible to address global climate action - be it the reduction of CO2 emissions or adaptation to its impacts - without taking into consideration the key role of ecosystems.
But for this voice not to be diluted, financial backing is needed, and this can only be achieved through the implementation on a global scale of instruments that put a fair price on carbon and give an economic value to ecosystem services. It is also necessary to review the mechanisms governing international financial flows associated with the green agenda in order to create incentives to enable the transition. And here the role of multilateral development banks stands out, especially regional institutions such as CAF, Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean. Having their own institution that meets the needs of the countries of the region, through a cooperative model and that mobilizes resources on the scale of the challenges, is key for Latin American and Caribbean countries to have a stronger global position. In this way, they will be able to build alliances with other regions, mutually reinforcing each other, especially at a time when multilateralism is being questioned.
The commitmentmade by CAF at COP30 to allocate US$40 billion by 2030 to green projects represents a clear commitment to promote the productive transformation of Latin America and the Caribbean, boosting both its energy independence, focused on renewable energies, and productive development based on biodiversity and a sustainable blue economy. In addition, more resilient infrastructures that favor regional integration will be financed and investments for agricultural transformation with practices that guarantee the control of deforestation will be boosted.
This effort is accompanied by the use of innovative financial instruments that seek to alleviate the fiscal burden of Latin American and Caribbean countries, while promoting decarbonization, resilience and biodiversity conservation. In the case of CAF, the blue bond linked to activities that protect the ocean, debt-for-nature swaps that restore ecosystems such as the Lempa River in El Salvador, and resilience bonds that prepare countries to face natural disasters stand out.
Latin America and the Caribbean today has a historic opportunity to lead the global transition to more sustainable models, highlighting the solutions it can offer to major environmental challenges and building alliances to strengthen its role as a supplier of critical raw materials for the energy transition and food security. The world needs what the region possesses, and the region needs to define its own development model, where prosperity is also measured in hectares of preserved forest, in unpolluted water reserves, in cities with clean mobility, and in communities whose actions are key to biodiversity and disaster risk reduction. The region continues to be the world's natural reserve, but through its commitment to sustainability and global alliances, it is on its way to becoming the most effective laboratory for solutions.
This article was published in the newspaper El País of Spain.
