Building the conditions for climate finance to reach agriculture

Agrifood systems generate around 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet receive only 7% of climate finance. This gap reflects more than a shortage of capital. It points to a deeper systems failure in how finance is prepared, governed and translated into viable opportunities for agriculture.

Across many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, fragmented policy frameworks, unclear institutional mandates, limited technical and measurement capacity, high transaction costs, and gaps in transparency, safeguards, participation and benefit-sharing continue to constrain access to finance. Without these enabling conditions, even where demand for investment or high-integrity carbon credits exists, mobilizing finance at scale and delivering lasting benefits for producers and rural communities remains difficult.

The Partnership for Agricultural Carbon works upstream of capital. We are a regional, multi-stakeholder public-good platform that strengthens four fundamental conditions: policy and institutional readiness; capacity at scale; transparency, data and decision support; and technical assistance and investment readiness.

We prepare and de-risk the conditions that enable governments, producer systems, farmers and partners to participate on informed terms and allow others to mobilize finance responsibly.

The Partnership for Agricultural Carbon emerged in response to the call from the Ministers of Agriculture of the Americas to strengthen the region’s capacity to access climate finance. It was incubated by the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative (VCMI) through its Access Strategies Program and is institutionally hosted by the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA).

This combination connects global high-integrity market architecture with ministerial relationships and agricultural capabilities across the region, helping translate growing interest in carbon markets and climate finance into policies, capacity, public-good tools and delivery systems that can work at scale.