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“The private sector entering the Amazon is most often flanked by soldiers, allowing the extractive companies to come in,” says impact investor Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter. But many of the Amazon’s new threats are also being driven by an illicit private sector, particularly illegal mining. Tune in for how private-sector tactics and market incentives make conserving the Amazon more profitable than exploiting it. Michelle’s impact investment fund is moving money directly to the people on the ground, ensuring responsible stewardship over the land and its rich biodiversity, as well as a sustainable and lucrative path forward in protecting the Andean Amazon. Recorded live at TED 2026 in conversation with TEDxLondon Director Deesha Chandra.
For more on illegal mining check out Claudia Vega’s TED Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojfZMid20iA
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Created by TEDxLondon
Executive produced by Josie Colter
Produced by Ben Beheshty
Curated by Deesha Chandra
Hosted by Maryam Pasha and Ben Hurst
Communications by Tara Cooper
00:00 Welcome and Big Question
00:21 Meet the Impact Investor
00:55 Private Sector Perceptions
01:52 Regenerative Value Chains
02:28 Specialty Cacao Opportunity
03:20 Investing Up the Supply Chain
04:39 Why Farmers Leave
05:23 Illegal Mining Pressure
06:02 Indigenous Leadership Matters
07:31 Trust and Risk Reframed
08:33 Blended Finance to Scale
09:11 Closing and Credits
Welcome and Big Question
[00:00:00] Maryam Pasha: Welcome to Climate Curious Quickies, bite-sized Nuggets of Climate Goodness. From our TEDx experts in under 10 minutes.
[00:00:10] Ben Hurst: In this week’s Climate Curious we’re asking, how do we get [00:00:15] more resources to the world’s richest biodiverse nation? The Andean Amazon.
Meet the Impact Investor
[00:00:21] Ben Hurst: Here to help us answer that question, is the woman moving millions, Impact Investor, Michelle Arévalo Carpenter.
[00:00:28] Ben Hurst: She’s leading the [00:00:30] design of a new impact investment fund focused on the Andean Amazon to ensure the stewards of such valuable biodiversity can do just that, keep it protected from chocolate farming to illegal mining. Here’s [00:00:45] Michelle Avalo carpenter on how to move millions to the Andean Amazon. Stay curious,
Private Sector Perceptions
[00:00:55] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: When you observe the private sector in the Amazon, if you [00:01:00] ask indigenous peoples, what do they think when they think of, when they think of the, uh, of the private sector? You have to think about the private sector entering the Amazon.
[00:01:09] Deesha Chandra: Mm-hmm.
[00:01:09] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: Only within the last century. Okay. And most often flanked by soldiers.[00:01:15]
[00:01:15] Deesha Chandra: Oh, okay.
[00:01:16] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: Right. Soldiers that are allowing the oil companies come to come in. Soldiers are allowing the mining and companies to come in. So their idea of the private sector is quite skewed. If we think about it. Private sector is what gives [00:01:30] us our coffee in the morning and what gives us like this wonderful bar of chocolate.
[00:01:33] Deesha Chandra: Mm-hmm.
[00:01:34] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: That’s what the private sector is to most people in the, in an urban setting.
[00:01:37] Deesha Chandra: Right.
[00:01:38] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: And then we realised, okay, but there is. Private sector activity within these communities, they only, [00:01:45] they just think of it in a different way.
[00:01:46] Deesha Chandra: Mm-hmm.
[00:01:47] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: It may not be the most efficient way, but actually it is the most regenerative way.
Regenerative Value Chains
[00:01:52] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: So we’ve actually observed that there’s, um, different value chains that have a lot of promise.
[00:01:56] Deesha Chandra: Mm-hmm.
[00:01:57] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: Uh, for example, non-timber, uh, forest products, [00:02:00] uh, you know, fruits that you would never pick up in the, the grocery store because you don’t even know what, how to eat them.
[00:02:04] Deesha Chandra: Yeah.
[00:02:05] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: They are super foods. They have incredible components and if you turn ’em into a.
[00:02:10] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: Great juice. Maybe you can start drinking it like what happened with acai, which was [00:02:15] largely unknown and now it’s just this like super fruit that everyone wants to have.
[00:02:18] Deesha Chandra: Yeah.
[00:02:18] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: Um, so, uh, what this opportunity that we’re seeing, um, is, uh, is to actually, instead of investing more in the existing solutions, there’s.
Specialty Cacao Opportunity
[00:02:28] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: For example, associations of [00:02:30] caca, of regenerative, cacao, uh, uh, growers mm-hmm. That grow cacao within forest settings. Mm-hmm. So you want, you have this incentive to keep the forest alive or to plant new forests. Um, that cacao is ancestral cacao that should not be sold [00:02:45] in a big S as at the commodity price.
[00:02:47] Deesha Chandra: Right.
[00:02:47] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: This specialty cacao should be sold to the finest c chocolatier in Japan and in Belgium and in Paris.
[00:02:54] Deesha Chandra: Because
[00:02:55] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: of the volume, size premium that it’s
[00:02:56] Deesha Chandra: produced.
[00:02:56] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: Exactly. It’s such small volumes. And the biodiversity of [00:03:00] cacao is the same as the biodiversity of, uh, of grapes within wines.
[00:03:04] Deesha Chandra: Right.
[00:03:05] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: So why would you get this beautiful chardonnay grape and maybe sell it as.
[00:03:09] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: You know, as a commodity, as a commodity in a supermarket, you would never do that, right? So you would never do, you should never do the same with cacao. [00:03:15] So that is an opportunity, a golden opportunity there for us and for these small holder farmers.
Investing Up the Supply Chain
[00:03:20] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: So what we want to do is we want to invest upstream. That is the main difference of how we design.
[00:03:25] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: Most funds think of it as portfolios. So you just have like a bunch of of [00:03:30] companies in the same industry. So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna take one value chain that is food based or forest, uh, or forest based. Yeah. And then we’re going to invest upstream, mid-market companies, the right logistics companies, certifiers distributors, [00:03:45] all the way to retail to ensure that.
[00:03:47] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: More, more invo, more and more value gets captured For the small holder farmers, we see so many things sometimes in like the high end markets, and you’re wondering out loud, okay, if I’m really paying more for this chocolate, [00:04:00] how much of it is really going to the small holder farmers?
[00:04:03] Speaker 5: Mm.
[00:04:03] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: And what we do is we ensure that that’s value that is being paid more by the end consumer actually makes it all the way to the smallholder farmers so that they have all the incentives in the world to [00:04:15] continue for serving the Amazon.
[00:04:16] Deesha Chandra: That’s brilliant. ’cause I guess a lot of people won’t know that the, a lot of producers don’t have this kind of support, like getting access to market, so that makes it quite novel, like your fund to be able to really give them support through the whole
[00:04:28] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: value check. Yes, exactly. I mean, [00:04:30] I, I know it’s like, maybe it sounds a bit nerdy, really.
[00:04:33] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: Um, but, but it, but, but we are so passionate about it because we can see the real value.
Why Farmers Leave
[00:04:39] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: Um, I, you know, I spoke with, with a family of, um, of cacao farmers. Mm-hmm. Uh, in January and, um, and they were saying, well, it’s 700 of us. Um, and, um, and we are losing families in our association every year.
[00:04:54] Maryam Pasha: Mm-hmm.
[00:04:54] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: Because, um, sometimes the, sometimes the price goes up, sometimes the price goes [00:05:00] down. Mm-hmm. They work so hard in such difficult. So hot and humid, and you, and these are ancestral cows, so you actually have to kind of, uh, like go up a tree to harvest. It’s not none of these like easy right, you know, generic or genetically modified [00:05:15] cows.
[00:05:15] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: It’s just this, this, you know, very difficult, uh, ancestral way of doing it. Mm-hmm. So they’re saying, oh, you know, the young people, they get tired.
Illegal Mining Pressure
[00:05:23] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: And then you have this illegal gold miners
[00:05:26] Deesha Chandra: mm-hmm.
[00:05:27] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: That come in, they give you $20,000 [00:05:30] cash to let’s. You know, and say, they say, Hey, let me till your river, let me destroy your, your hectares.
[00:05:38] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: These will grow again, but you’ll get cash upfront.
[00:05:41] Speaker 5: Right?
[00:05:41] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: So of course it’s a no brainer if you think about it, you know, you’re thinking, oh, maybe [00:05:45] I could send my kid to university. Mm-hmm. Maybe I could, uh, you know, cure my grandmother of this ailment. Of course you want to make sure that you do that, so, and it, that’s why it’s so urgent, uh, um, illegal gold mining is destroying the and and Amazon at unprecedented rates and we [00:06:00] need to do something about it.
Indigenous Leadership Matters
[00:06:02] Deesha Chandra: Why do you think it’s really important to have indigenous LED initiatives so central to the work that you’re doing in the Amazon and the fund?
[00:06:10] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: There’s two levels, right? There’s the normative level, right. And at the level, [00:06:15] indigenous led initiatives honour a sense of, um, justice to what is essentially their land.
[00:06:24] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: So there’s that normal ele and that’s why it’s important in my heart.
[00:06:27] Speaker 5: Yeah.
[00:06:27] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: And of course then there’s also my brain and my [00:06:30] financial brain, right? And, and it, it really is the most efficient way. So if we’re designing a fund. That invests in the Amazon, and we know that money capital tends to operate in a different way [00:06:45] as nature.
[00:06:45] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: Mm-hmm. Right. We have a conundrum, and the way we solve that conundrum is to engage with indigenous led initiatives. Indigenous people know how to harvest the forest. Yeah. You cannot bring in a workforce from [00:07:00] abroad to come into the Amazon and try to go up those trees and, and harvest that beautiful fruit.
[00:07:05] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: And because we don’t, you know, we don’t even know or understand the cycles of harvest within the Amazon because it’s a forest.
[00:07:11] Deesha Chandra: Yeah.
[00:07:12] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: But indigenous people have lived there for ancestral [00:07:15] times and they understand it. And they are our guides for how can we, in a respectful, regenerative way. Harvest the fruits of this forest for good, but we have to let them lead and we have to [00:07:30] trust them.
Trust and Risk Reframed
[00:07:31] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: So I think that the gap in efficiency, the gap in investment that goes to regenerative solutions is the same gap as the gap of trust, and you just have to take a leap of faith. I was just talking [00:07:45] to, to a gentleman here at Ted.
[00:07:46] Speaker 5: Mm-hmm.
[00:07:46] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: And, uh, and, and was explaining to him that, you know, it’s, it’s a different level, you know, profile of risk, the type of fund that we’re designing in the Amazon than one we’re designing for urban centres.
[00:07:57] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: And he’s like, yeah, well it sounds very risky. I was like, [00:08:00] yeah, but VC is incredibly risky.
[00:08:03] Deesha Chandra: Right.
[00:08:04] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: You see people pouring billions into AI not knowing if it’s gonna work.
[00:08:08] Deesha Chandra: Yeah,
[00:08:08] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: exactly. Every single day. And nobody’s wondering that. So I think it’s a matter of values, it’s a matter of trust, and it’s [00:08:15] also a matter of understanding, like, what are you willing to risk to protect the lungs of the earth?
[00:08:21] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: And if your answer is very little, then maybe we shouldn’t be talking. Right? Yeah. Um, maybe I should be talking to people that really understand how to adjust that [00:08:30] risk and help us interpret that risk in a better way.
Blended Finance to Scale
[00:08:33] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: So we can attract commercial capital. Um, I am in some conversations with some foundations that are very curious about how might they deploy some of their philanthropic grants into this type of funds, uh, so that we can, uh, blend the finance and blend the, the level of risk so that we can attract some more commercial capital and really build these markets.
[00:08:54] Michelle Arévalo-Carpenter: Um, if we, if we manage to do this for three value chains. It doesn’t end there. [00:09:00] You know, it, we’re actually changing the entire narrative about what the forest is good for. Mm-hmm. In the minds of voters, in, in urban areas across the Indian region.
[00:09:09] Deesha Chandra: Thank
[00:09:09] Deesha Chandra: you.
Closing and Credits
[00:09:11] Ben Hurst: Thanks for listening to this quickie.
[00:09:13] Maryam Pasha: This episode was created by our [00:09:15] superstar podcast team at TEDxLondon .
[00:09:17] Maryam Pasha: Until next time,
[00:09:18] Ben Hurst: Stay curious.
