The UN declared 2025 the International Year of Cooperatives. The theme of the year—”Cooperatives Build a Better World”—provided a splendid opportunity for the worldwide cooperative movement to mark its existence as vital to building a better world by limiting the effects of climate change. Unfortunately, that didn’t occur. To be more precise, it didn’t occur with the bureaucrats associated with various top-heavy international organizations that represent the cooperative economic sector on the world stage.
However, the Organization of Brazilian Cooperatives (OCB) did take a stand to support the UN Climate Summit, COP30, held in Belem, Brazil on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. The OCB issued a Manifesto outlining their many projects that support a truly sustainable society.
The main opposition to the International Fossil Fuel Lobby comes from nations that are the least responsible for the devastation caused by a warming planet. These nations for the most part are powerless to oppose the insanity of that Lobby. What is notable about the cooperative Manifesto is that it comes from Brazil, a country that the World Bank lists as the 10th-largest economy in the world. And not surprisingly, according to 2024 data, Brazil ranks 9th in daily oil production.
More importantly, Brazil ranks 6th among countries emitting GHGs, accounting for 2.5% of total worldwide emissions, right behind Russia, which emits 5%. With a population of nearly 216,000,000, Brazil must be recognized as an economic and political power. Likewise, the cooperative sector in Brazil is a significant force in Brazilian society. The latest figures indicate that there are 6,828 cooperatives in the country with 425,318 worker-members. The majority of co-ops are in the agricultural sector. However, if we include cooperative housing, food co-ops, and over 750 credit unions with 9 million members, the total membership in cooperatives rises to over 14 million.
The OCB’s credit union network and its staff of 45,000 combat the effects of climate change by supporting ecological land initiatives such as agricultural restoration and exploring biofuel ventures; they also promote waste management and alternative energy projects.
As we see, the Brazilian cooperative sector is a major economic force, and its Manifesto advances four radical governing principles. The First Principle: the natural economy of photosynthesis has both social and economic value, most apparent in the tropical belt, where rural communities attempt to protect forests and practice eco-friendly agriculture.
The Second: paradoxically, climate serves as a driver of development by promoting innovation. In Brazil, for example, agricultural waste is used to produce bioenergy in the form of ethanol and biodiesel. Where electrical infrastructure doesn’t exist, biofuels function as an expedient alternative to fossil fuels.
The Third Principle: this principle seems most obvious, but unfortunately, it isn’t—communities need to be the focus for action. Funding must directly reach and support local actions to promote economic incentives. A top-down system of financial allocations won’t motivate participation as much as one based on local control of funds.
Most importantly, Principle Four states unambiguously that cooperatives are the means to achieve climate change goals. Why? Cooperatives have an ethical foundation for social inclusion, democratic social organization, and territorial development in the communities where they operate. As the Manifesto states:
Their widespread presence and the reach of their assistance networks promote funding for local initiatives and the implementation of sustainable practices in agriculture, renewable energy, waste management, and conservation.
The Manifesto explores in depth five main points of the cooperative’s Green Program: food security, technology and low-carbon agriculture; the valorization of communities and climate funding; energy transition and sustainable development; bioeconomy as a driver of development; and adaptation and mitigation of climate risks. To review their significance, these areas will be briefly elaborated below.
1. Food security, technology and low-carbon agriculture
With more than 1 million member producers, 71% of whom are family farmers, cooperatives are key players in supplying more than 53% of the national grain harvest to Brazilians.
OCB supports 9,000 technicians (a role similar to the US County Extension Agent system) working with the cooperatives. One benefit of this assistance is the reduction of the agricultural carbon footprint. The cooperative farms reclaim degraded pastures, adopt sustainable soil management, handle agro-industrial waste in sound ways, conserve environmental assets, and foster bioeconomic initiatives. The Brazilian cooperative model can serve as a benchmark for countries where agriculture is a major sector by demonstrating how to combine productive growth, technological innovation, and respect for the environment.
2. OCB climate funding
Brazil’s credit unions are present in more than half of Brazil’s municipalities, offering financial services to about 1.5 million people. This extensive network provides access to credit for small producers and entrepreneurs who would otherwise find it difficult to acquire financial support.
Furthermore, credit unions are receptive to green projects because they are rooted in their communities, which means they are best positioned to assess the risks of sustainable projects. If a project is viable, they can leverage both public and private funding for otherwise abandoned green endeavors. Credit unions, in this way, recirculate money back into their communities and do not, like private finance, extract local wealth.
3. Energy transition and sustainable development
It is notable that the Manifesto discusses the energy transition as one of the most urgent challenges of global climate governance. In 2023, 736 Brazilian cooperatives generated their own energy, a significant increase compared to 2022, when 582 cooperatives generated part of their energy. The highlight for 2023 was solar installations with 3,523 projects.
During COP30, Brazil’s cooperative sector led the debate on the energy transition in a just, orderly, and equitable manner. It was expected that a UN-sponsored roadmap to a planned transition away from fossil fuels would be finalized. It failed. The delegates succumbed to the fossil fuel lobby. What was agreed upon was a voluntary roadmap endorsed by a majority of the delegations.
4. Bioeconomy as a development driver
The Manifesto promotes regenerative agriculture in Brazil not as a mitigation measure, as we find in much of the US discussion of the topic, but as a driver of the bioeconomy, incorporating biofertilizers and biopesticides.
In the Amazon, a range of products can be grown sustainably, that is, in balance with the environment: acai, Brazil nuts, and rubber. Besides native products like babassu oil, which has properties similar to those of coconut oil, and cupuaçu. The pulp of the cupuaçu fruit is used to make ice creams, snack bars, and other products.
The Manifesto advocates for federal funding to prevent land grabbing, deforestation, and organized crime related to drug processing. More importantly, funding is needed to encourage a cooperative bioeconomy that values the diversity of Brazilian biomes. Funding in this manner strengthens the role of agricultural cooperatives to link up with the rest of the cooperative economy to generate employment and income and prevent illegal activities.
5. Adaptation and mitigation of climate risks
The last section of the Manifesto is devoted to an aspect of the climate catastrophe that is missing in environmental narratives in the developed world—adaptation. 94 percent of Brazilian municipalities have been affected by natural disasters in recent decades, directly affecting millions of people.
In this context, cooperatives are an instrument of sustainability and resilience. With their wide reach and operations in strategic sectors such as agriculture, infrastructure and credit, cooperatives have the potential to develop local, scalable responses to climate change. The capacity of cooperatives to lead climate mitigation and adaptation processes is evident in initiatives aimed at the recovery of infrastructure. Cooperatives have also adopted sustainable production systems and developed innovative techniques to deal with extreme weather events.
The primary importance of the cooperative sector in Brazil and elsewhere, where cooperatives are established, lies in their effective embedding in communities. This inherent decentralization encourages local participation in resilience and adaptation projects. The Brazilian cooperatives have initiated, among other things, watershed restoration, massive tree planting, stockpiles of supplies for crisis situations, and have built ecological corridors for wildlife to encourage the occupation of larger ranges.
Indigenous populations, due to the practice of localism, participate in the cooperative movement. For example, the Foresters and Reforesters Work Cooperative of the Pataxó Boca da Mata Indigenous village (Cooplanjé) in Bahia has reforested 210 hectares of Atlantic Rainforest in the Monte Pascoal-Pau Brasil Ecological Corridor.
While the Manifesto was not an official state document, it nevertheless has the heft of a large oppositional movement to capitalist orthodoxy. And further, it’s a movement that has an established economic presence “on the ground,” as journalists like to say.
The Manifesto deserves world recognition not as a statement of hope, of possibility, but, significantly, of strategy.
Its importance, as far as I can determine, has been ignored by the worldwide bureaucratic, cooperative establishment. In fact, one could say that the Manifesto is an embarrassment to that establishment, which has simply mouthed inanities about “sustainable development” which come directly from corporate press releases.
The question about its importance is derived from several points that are highlighted in the Manifesto. First and foremost, the Brazilian cooperative movement is a “Green Movement” incorporating an established and enduring infrastructure of varied economic institutions from a large agricultural sector to an extensive financial network and a varied complement of technical assistance entities. These institutions work together to achieve eco-friendly goals.
The network of cooperatives makes possible plans to mitigate both man-made and natural impediments to sustainable goals. The collaboration of these networked cooperative institutions provides the means to forge adaptations to an environment devastated by climate change. Agricultural seed research, for instance, works to find crops best suited for drought conditions.
The Brazilian Manifesto may be more relevant to countries in the South, where agriculture is a significant economic driver, than to the overdeveloped economies of the North. In any case, the Brazilian cooperative economy isn’t necessarily a model to be replicated. We should see it as a guide to what is possible when cooperative institutions are present in significant numbers and where they search for a post-capitalist response to environmental degradation and resource depletion.
In the US, with both agricultural cooperatives and co-op utilities covering rural America, there exists an infrastructure that could be mobilized to contend with climate change. Already, in a modest way, co-op utilities supply a grid to farms that support local solar and wind generation. If we add in local credit unions that can provide loans to purchase renewable energy sources, then that already in place network of cooperatives can realize a major advance beyond the use of fossil fuels.
The US, unlike Brazil, has many housing cooperatives, from smaller multi-unit residential buildings of the sort found in many college towns, to huge estates like those in New York City. And as with the farming communities, these buildings could be fitted with solar panels purchased with the help of a local credit union. These endeavors could be expanded to forest restoration of the sort practiced for over ten years in the Northwest by the Hoedads in the 1980s. There is a need to catalyze these eco-friendly projects, and fortunately, we have a model in a two-decade-old Canadian research cooperative, Sustainability Solutions Group (SSG). With a staff of 30, it provides a range of services for governments, communities, and other cooperatives. UK’s Coop News reports:
SSG… helps decision-makers confront the climate crisis by providing services that span greenhouse gas inventories, carbon budgeting, climate mitigation and adaptation planning, scenario modelling and implementation support.
The catalyst in this case, SSG, is a worker cooperative enterprise that could be replicated, as in Brazil’s OCB, with 9,000 technicians to aid farmers. The beauty of a decentralized project is that it relies on cooperative institutions already in place across the country. All we need is to convince the siloed cooperative sectors to collaborate on projects to address the socio-economic-cultural catastrophe we have entered.
