Brazil’s climate conversation has a habit of returning to the same question: how can a country that depends so much on its natural riches also protect them? Renata Piazzon, who leads the São Paulo–based Instituto Arapyaú, naturally straddles that line. A lawyer by training, she has become one of Brazil’s clearest voices for aligning conservation with development, arguing that the health of the forest and the well-being of those who live in it are inseparable. Amazon rainforest. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler Her path into climate work began early. Piazzon grew up watching her father travel to remote Amazonian communities as part of an NGO that worked with Indigenous peoples. She wanted to go along, but he refused—so she set out to make her own way there. After studying environmental law, she shifted from litigation to sustainability, a move she traces to a single moment: watching Christiana Figueres steer the Paris Agreement talks at COP21. “I thought, that’s what I want to do with my life,” she recalls. At Arapyaú, founded 17 years ago by Brazilian entrepreneur Guilherme Leal, Piazzon oversees programs on climate, forests, and the bio-economy. The foundation was one of the first in Brazil to make climate its core mission, back when, she jokes, “the entire field could fit in a van.” Since then, a small circle of business leaders has grown into a network of perhaps a dozen or more philanthropists who see sustainability not as ideology but as good strategy. She works to draw them…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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