Background
For more than 20 years, Natura has been buying from Amazon’s own people. The company has worked with Amazonian communities to develop sustainable harvesting practices. Since launching its Ekos line in 2000, it has built a business around the forest and developed 44 bioingredients. Chains like tucumã and açaí feed those ingredients, which means a lot of families depend on trees staying where they are. Natura and its partners help conserve 2.2 million hectares today, with a goal of 3 million by 2030. But one old belief kept getting in the way that making money from Amazon means cutting it down. A cleared field shows up on a balance sheet. A standing tree doesn’t.
Insight
The people who live in the forest already know how valuable it is. They know where the trees are, which ones give fruit and which ones matter. But that knowledge lived in memory and conversation, and a lender or a planner can’t read a conversation. Land decisions get made on what can be counted, and nobody has counted this. As long as the forest stayed uncounted, it would keep losing the argument to the cleared field, no matter how much anyone cared. And that’s why Natura realised the data had to come before the argument.
Idea
The Amazon Greenventory takes the most ordinary business tool there is, the inventory, and points it at a living forest. Instead of asking people to value the Amazon in the abstract, Natura decided to catalogue it tree by tree. A forest that has been counted stops being scenery. It becomes something that can be planned around, protected and invested in. It is a small shift in thinking with big consequences that nature is no longer in the way of development, it is the stock.
Execution
Natura built this with Bioverse, a Brazilian forest-intelligence startup, while Africa Creative DDB São Paulo told the story. The work was created for Natura and Instituto Natura, with technical support from Bioverse. The technology does the heavy lifting. Drones from another Brazilian company, XMobots, fly over the forest, and an AI system analyses the images to identify tree species and give their exact coordinates. The platform was trained to recognise Amazonian species of economic and ecological importance, and it can also classify how land is being used. Finep, Brazil’s innovation funding agency, financed the project.
The scale is hard to picture, so the numbers help. In just six months the team mapped 60,000 hectares, more than 100,000 football fields, in what is described as the largest forest inventory carried out in the region. It also spotted degraded areas 200 times faster than conventional methods.
What makes the project feel different is who was in the room. The forest wasn’t mapped from a distance. About 70 families from the communities of Abaetetuba and Irituia in Pará took part. Some were hired and trained to operate the equipment themselves. The goal was also practical rather than symbolic. In an earlier phase, the data was handed to harvester cooperatives so they could plan production better. The people who know the forest best got a tool to match. Then came the story.
Awards
Cannes Lions 2025:
That year the category drew 480 entries, shortlisted 46, and awarded 16 Lions.
Watch the full campaign here.
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