Brazil to push social diversity as criteria for sustainable investments at COP30

By Marcela Ayres and Bernardo Caram

Brazil plans to propose social diversity as a global criteria for labeling sustainable investments at the U.N. climate summit it will host this year, a senior official said on Wednesday, despite rising resistance to diversity goals in some corners.

Cristina Reis, deputy secretary for sustainable economic development at Brazil's Finance Ministry, told Reuters that the government is already including racial and gender equality among national standards for classifying investments as sustainable.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has worked to position Brazil as a destination for sustainable investments, with a new regulated carbon market and "green" sovereign bond issuances.

While some see the return of U.S. President Donald Trump as a setback for Brazil's climate ambitions and global cooperation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the COP30 in November, Reis said the host country is undeterred.

"This international alignment faces setbacks over time and across regions, but it follows a common direction that I believe persists ... because we face an undeniable, life-threatening challenge: climate change," she said.

Brazil has prioritized developing a national "taxonomy" of sustainable investments this year, Reis said, and it aims to propose some elements, including diversity-based standards, for global adoption at the COP30 as part of a "supertaxonomy."

She said using diversity as a criteria to label corporate investments as sustainable would be "a very feasible technical and methodological path" for more countries.

In his first days in office, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement - the international treaty aimed at curbing global warming - and moved to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies in the federal workforce. Major U.S. companies, including Alphabet's Google, Meta and Amazon have also rolled back their DEI initiatives.