DATA MONITOR APRIL 2025: Brazil’s Corporate Greenwashing Stalls Climate Progress

In this month’s data monitor we celebrate the launch of the Observatory for Information (Oii) newsletter in English and Portuguese, with a special edition focusing on a slice of the context in Brazil, the next host of COP. You can sign up for this newsletter, written by our partners at FALA, in English and Portuguese.

To be aligned to 1.5 degree targets, the next COP30 host Brazil has some work to do. The country produces greenhouse gas emissions on a massive scale, thanks to its burgeoning mining, fossil fuel and especially agrobusiness sectors. In 2023, the country emitted nearly 2.3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent – the majority of which was created directly by the agriculture sector directly, or indirectly through land use change.

As in Europe and internationally, a decades-long charm offensive on behalf of these industries has taken place in Brazil. Agribusiness is famous for its “Agro é Tech, Agro é Pop, Agro é Tudo” campaign, contributing to the industry’s favourability to 7 out of every 10 Brazilians. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel sector, known for its multi-billion marketing budgets worldwide, is viewed in Brazil as centrally important to national development, even in progressive spaces. The state-owned oil and gas company Petrobras wins the poll “Brand that best represents Brazil” every year.

In today’s data monitor, we reflect on a new CAAD briefing that analyses the digital footprint of the top 15 influential and revenue generating agribusiness, fossil fuel and mining companies in Brazil. That briefing shows just how much these organisations commit to climate and sustainability marketing. This marketing contrasts starkly with the reality of these organisations’ commitments to climate and the environment. In this context, these sustainability communications look far more like disinformation – through the vehicle of corporate greenwashing.

THREE INDICATORS OF A SAD ENVIRONMENTAL RECORD…

Firstly, three organisations on our list – Petrobras, Shell and Vale are among the top 10 organisations fined by Ibama (the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources) in the past 25 years. Petrobras alone was fined 2,705 times.

Figure 1: Fines in the past 25 years by the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources.

Secondly, we found seven of the 15 organisations studied on InfluenceMap’s LobbyMap database, which tracks organisations’ lobbying and engagement on climate policy. All rank poorly. In the table below, no company scores better than a C, which indicates non-alignment with science-aligned positions on climate policies. Meanwhile a D rank reflects obstructive action. What’s more, six of the seven organisations are actively engaged, as 13 is the threshold for such active engagement.

Figure 2: Lobbymap’s rankings of the seven Brazilian organisations tracked, accessed through Lobbymap.org.

Consistent with the number of fines Petrobras has received, we found the most examples of this entity openly pushing for activity misaligned with 1.5 degrees, far outweighing rare advocacy for net zero by 2050. This misaligned activity includes press releases and other publicity pushing back on government decisions made on the basis of the environment, like not awarding drilling licenses in the Amazon, and publicly lobbying policymakers to make investments, deploy infrastructure or take other measures that risk fossil fuel lock-in.

We also found lobbying activity from Shell that shows a misalignment with climate targets. While in 2024 it advocated in principle for net zero by 2050 – there was an emphasis on the need for land use change, which the fossil fuel industry happens to be less responsible for. Meanwhile Shell did advocate for more oil and gas exploration not in line with its stated net zero targets. Other activity includes advocating for partial or false solutions like carbon credits instead of simply stopping all new oil and gas exploration, as is required. And finally, directly lobbying the Brazilian President, including right before a scheduled speech on climate change in New York.

One final example to illustrate the Lobbymap table is meat company JBS – a company that appears to spend more on advertising than its declared efforts to reach net zero. Its support for legislation is vague and top level. But lobbying activity takes place when prospective policy change threatens the organisation’s revenue – such as ensuring that meat is exempted from taxes for environmentally harmful products, or not supporting dietary transitions away from meat. The company also sponsored a forum that featured speakers denying established science on the need to make such dietary transitions.

Finally, we found eight of the studied organisations from our briefing available on Net Zero Tracker. The Tracker finds that while all of these organisations have a net zero by 2050 plan, none of them are sufficient. Each company either has no known or an insufficiently detailed plan, no reporting mechanism, has incomplete coverage for crucial scope 3 emissions, or relies on ineffective carbon credits to reach its targets. But this hasn’t stopped many of these companies marketing these plans as evidence of sustainable action.

Figure 3: Overview of companies’ net zero plans according to Net Zero Tracker. Find the full definitions and methodology for the Tracker here

…MEANWHILE, AN OUTWARD FOCUS ON SUSTAINABILITY

Despite this evidence, many of the agribusiness, mining and fossil fuel companies that we reviewed do a lot of talking when it comes to climate and sustainability. Up to 64% of press releases / articles on the companies’ websites in the past year pertained to sustainability – with 19.25% the median score. This is an early indication of an overreliance on sustainability messaging across the set of companies studied

Figure 4: Revenue, total number of articles / posts in the past year and total number related to climate / sustainability for the 15 organisations studied in our briefing. Note that Ambev and Ultrapar had no dedicated newsroom page on their websites, and so the volume of Facebook posts was instead searched.

Sustainability narratives, which are detailed further alongside specific examples in our briefing note, included well studied discourses of climate delay or forms of corporate greenwashing:

• Nature-rinsing imagery: green colour schemes and pictures of nature to create a perception of environmental friendliness.
• Vague statements i.e. little detail or evidence on sustainability targets or overall progress.
• A strong focus on socio-environmentalism, in particular cherry picking small projects (relative to revenue) with a low impact compared to the companies’ revenue and environmental impact.
• Pushing fossil fuel oriented or other non-transformative solutions such as recycling, water saving, reforestation and biofuels (in which Brazil is big player due to the high production of sugarcane).
• In some cases, ‘solutionism’: emphasising their companies as part of the solution. In this case agribusinesses focused on food security or their role in feeding the world, while fossil fuel companies position themselves as essential to shaping growing energy demand worldwide, as well as key investors the clean energy transition.
• In some cases, companies focus commitments around scope 1 and scope 2 emissions, excluding the importance of scope 3.

WHAT NOW?

Agribusiness, fossil fuel and mining companies are not trustworthy actors when it comes to Paris aligned action. But the communications of the largest revenue generators in Brazil betrays this – showing that, like elsewhere globally, profits are being used to delay the transition. There is a strong case that polluting industries should be excluded entirely from COP30 – or that, at a minimum, steps be taken to minimise their influence.

Meanwhile, as we hurtle to a world beyond 1.5 degrees, the billions of marketing dollars spent worldwide by polluting industries has emerged as an urgent barrier to climate action. The global campaign to ban fossil fuel advertisements has gained momentum thanks to the Hague’s world-first ban, which was just upheld in court by a Dutch judge who rejected the industry’s complaint. The ban has the support of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who called for the fossil fuel industry to be treated like the tobacco industry, urging “every country to ban advertising from fossil-fuel companies.” Most importantly, the public is supportive, as shown by a recent CAAD survey showing people in The Netherlands think banning fossil fuel ads would be effective at addressing climate disinformation, and a survey published in Nature Climate Change that showed support for the policy in Europe was twice as high as opposition.

This is, of course, not the last you will hear from us this year on the crucial context in Brazil. Through to COP30, we will present a short section of the data monitor each month focusing on Brazil, with help from our partners at FALA. But we encourage you to receive more detailed insights to your inbox with the Observatory for Information Integrity (Oii) newsletter. Check out the first edition by clicking the Portuguese or English banners below and subscribe to receive it every month.

IN OTHER NEWS

At least ten cases of climate misinformation on French broadcasts every week. That’s what QuotaClimat has found with a new AI detection tool, verified by human fact checkers. As with digital, climate misinformation spikes on French TV and radio with major geopolitical events, with political speech in particular being a big original source. Advertisers, regulators and civil society all need to do more about this harder-to-study but highly influential vector of misinformation. Read the report in French or English.

Bot what about Canada? These days, if the name of the day ends in a ‘Y’ you can be sure to find bots on the platform X. One set of bot-like accounts piqued our interest lately, as they seem to be specifically promoting right-wing Youtube channels in Canada. The bot-like accounts were first found attacking Liberal candidate (now Prime Minister) Mark Carney for his supposed plan to self-enrich due to net zero. This activity wasn’t enough to sway the election this time around, but remains a clear “threat to democracy”.

New research from The Good Lobby, as reported by The Guardian, sheds light on ties between EU public affairs and law firms and the fossil fuel industry. Despite public sustainability commitments, major consultancies continue to enable fossil fuel influence over climate policy, highlighting a significant gap between words and actions.

if you have any investigative leads CAAD should explore, want to find out more about our research and intel, or interview one of our members, please email [email protected].