Inside Natura & Co's alternative vision for the Amazon
Natura & Co sustainability executives sit down with BusinessGreen to discuss how the company balances profitability and sustainability, and why the Paris Agreement will fail unless the Amazon is protected. Read More

Perfume lovers who want to be transported to the Amazon in a single spritz need look no further than Natura’s Ekos Alma fragrance. That’s according to the product’s promotional materials, anyway, which claim the fragrance’s unique cocktail of ingredients sourced from the rainforest, including priprioca root and oil collected from the trunk of the Copaifera tree, “convey the mysterious energy of the Amazonian life cycle.”
Marketing spiel aside, the way the product is sold does, in some respects, reflect the natural rhythms of the rainforest. The perfume will enjoy a limited run every year, in line with the availability of its raw materials, and each bottle is packaged with detailed information on its ingredients.
The perfume, launched in 2019, is part of an effort from the Brazilian beauty giant to sustainability source ingredients for its beauty products from the Amazon and underscore the benefits of keeping the rainforest intact as a hotbed of biodiversity, while also communicating to end consumers about nature’s benefits and limits.
“We need to build value out of the forest as a forest, not as an empty space,” Marcelo Behar, vice president of sustainability and group affairs at Natura’s parent company, Natura & Co, told BusinessGreen. For Natura, this involves researching the availability and properties of natural ingredients that could be used in its products, then working closely with local communities to ensure they can grow and harvest them sustainably.
This is no small feat. “It takes weeks to go where the sourcing areas are, and days for the boats to gather the fruits,” Behar explained. “You have to build a business model where you explain to the consumer that from time to time the product they love won’t be available because it is not nature’s time to be available. To really source from traditional communities, you have to create a whole calendar that works alongside nature.”
The Ekos Alma perfume is just one of a number of “virtual” products offered only when they are in stock, explains Kevyan Macedo, Natura’s senior sustainability manager, who argues the firm’s direct selling model gives it the opportunity to control the pipeline of products being offered to consumers at any given point throughout the year.
Natura, founded some 50 years ago in Sao Paolo, has long purported to be a leader in sustainable beauty, and its Ekos brand in particular boasts a menu of ingredients sourced from the Amazon, such as acai berries, ucuuba seeds and murumuru butter. But the firm has ballooned in size over the last six years after acquiring Australian skin care brand Aesop in 2016, U.K. retailer Body Shop in 2018 and fellow direct-selling cosmetics business Avon in early 2020. The acquisition spree has made it the fourth largest beauty company in the world, and it is hoping to used its enhanced profile to set an example for how companies should approach nature protection.
As a company headquartered in Brazil that has long sourced ingredients for its beauty products directly from local communities, Natura has a valuble perspective on the climate and nature emergencies, Behar argues. “Natura has been operating with the Amazon for 20 years, not just sourcing from over 30 traditional communities but learning to do things in a different way,” he said. “It implies a different business perspective.” The acquisition of Aesop, another company based in the southern hemisphere with close links to Indigenous communities, strengthens the company’s unique perspective on climate change and nature protection, Behar adds.
Natura & Co’s sustainability strategy, published last year and applies to all four of its brands, is notable for its sharp focus on rainforest protection and nature restoration — a topic that sometimes can be sidelined by corporate emission reduction targets. It commits the company to hard targets for expanding its influence on forest preservation programs, creating new revenue streams via bio-ingredients, and ramping up its investment in communities that protect and preserve biodiversity. The hope is that Natura’s approach can inspire other firms looking to establish nature protection metrics of their own, Behar said.
“Natura is one of the few companies that has targets for ingredients, for how much it operates with traditional communities, and the amount of resource we are spending on the Amazon,” he said. “We hope that becomes a benchmark for industry to learn how to operate within communities, who are the true guardians of biodiversity. The less we are able to do that effectively, we will not be in good shape. There is time, but we are running against the clock.”
Working effectively with local communities goes beyond sourcing from traditional farmers and involves investing time, commitment and resources into understanding communities’ priorities, Behar explained. Natura has a dedicated division that “goes deep” into communities to understand their needs and how they operate, he says. The sustainability strategy commits the firm has to invest $12 million into local communities; by the end of the decade; it had invested $6.53 million as of last year.
“Something that I don’t see a lot in northern Atlantic markets is the need to connect business with traditional communities,” Behar observed, arguing European and North American brands tend to focus on small farmers as the “unit for regeneration” instead of the broader communities in which they operate. “Yet they are the ones who are really able to connect to nature, to rebuild and start regenerating. Our contribution is to explain how we did it for the last 20 years and to amplify that into different geographies.”
One way the firm is working with communities is through its effort to grow the number of natural ingredients on its books, Behar says, explaining the drive to establish new value chains around tropical plants, nuts and berries is designed to deliver economic benefits to traditional communities while simultaneously tackling deforestation. The firm has committed to grow the number of bio ingredients it uses from 38 today to 55 by the end of the decade.
To illustrate this point, Behar points to the firm’s successful effort to protect the Amazon’s once-endangered ucuuba tree. After discovering the hydrating properties of ucuuba seed butter, Natura offered local communities three times more to harvest half a tree’s seeds than they were receiving for chopping it down for wood. As sustainable harvesting of ucuuba seeds ramped up, deforestation of the tree plummeted, leading to the tree’s removal from Brazil’s endangered species list, Behar explained. “It was a solution that we created for our products that was also regenerative and very beneficial to the communities,” he said.
The company wants to replicate this approach. Part of a $100 million pot committed to “regenerative solutions” by the firm’s sustainability strategy will go towards finding new natural ingredients and working with communities to ensure they are incentivized to harvest these ingredients in a sustainable way, he adds. And this is one of many ways the Natura intends to meet its goal of “expanding its influence” on Amazon protection from 4.5 million acres to 7.4 million acres by the end of this decade.
Of course, Natura is not alone in trying to enhance Amazon protection at a time when deforestation rates have surged under the government of Jair Bolsonaro. European supermarkets recently have threatened to boycott Brazilian products in response to a proposed law which many experts fear will accelerate deforestation by legalizing the private occupation of public land. Behar counsels strongly against such an approach, noting that blanket bans on Brazilian products from certain products could exacerbate the problem.
“I see boycott as a solution for those that are not willing to have anything to do with the situation, not those who are willing to reverse the situation and work to turn around the problem,” he argued. A boycott from select U.K. and European retailers will not stop the flow of products going from the Latin American nation to the U.S. and China, and ultimately could lead to prices being slashed and a net increase in exports to other nations. “It could be disastrous,” he warned.
Instead businesses serious about protecting the Amazon should look at their whole value chain and invest in traceability, certification and sourcing, Behar recommends. “[It involves] working with those who are doing the correct things, placing more money where the good practices are, instead of allowing those practices to vanish,” he said. “There are 28 million people living in the Amazon; that is a reality. We need to find a way to reconcile development and preservation. If we take away both, you leave the Amazon for the agricultural forces destroying it currently.”
Natura is part of a project, Concertação pela Amazônia (Consultation for the Amazon), which brings together NGOs, academia, political actors and companies to plot and promote approaches to sustainable development in the rainforest, including finding new ways to give value to the forest. Behar described it as “a collective effort to find an alternative solution for the development of the region.”
2020 was meant to be a landmark year for the corporate fight against deforestation. Brands in the Consumer Goods Forum (CGF) — which includes a raft of household names such as Unilever, Kraft and Mondelez — failed spectacularly to achieve their 2010 goal to end net deforestation within a decade, with deforestation surging to a 12-year high last year. Is Natura & Co — which joined the group earlier this year — confident in the ability of firms to reverse this poor track record?
“We are failing miserably recently on protecting the Amazon collectively,” Behar conceded. However, he argues there is a precedent for deforestation rates being curbed that companies and policymakers should not ignore. Deforestation may have surged over recent years, but between 2002 and 2014 trends were going in the other direction, as public and private players aligned behind projects and policies designed to protect the forest and command and control environmental policies were introduced, he says.
“We need to replicate many solutions that are already in place, and we now have we have the benefit of social media, stronger data, stronger awareness, traceability, elements from blockchain that will help a lot,” he said. “I am by duty an optimist, and I think we have the perspective we need to bet on projects that will allow us to regenerate and move the forest away from the tipping point it has reached.”
A global agreement on nature protection at this autumn’s COP15 U.N. Biodiversity Convention conference could also prove critical in catalyzing progress over the coming years, according to Behar and Macedo. A headline treaty that results in countries adopting national nature targets, akin to the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for climate action that resulted from the Paris Agreement, could unlock critical public and private financing for nature restoration projects and give a clearer framework for companies looking to establish their own biodiversity targets.
“If we have a construction which allows each and every country to know how nature positive there are, how much they want to restore, then it will be easier for companies to build their own metrics and their own targets in reference to what countries are proposing,” Behar said.
To come up with Natura & Co’s metrics for nature reporting, Behar and Macedo reveal how they considered a mix of approaches recommended by green business groups, including the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the World Economic Forum, One Planet For Biodiversity, the Unit for Ethical Trade and the Science-Based Targets Networks. They hope the broad approach they decided on ultimately will inspire other firms towards setting up their own nature protection targets. “We set ourselves four big buckets, four big numbers, that we think can work for ourselves and could become a reference that could be used in other geographies with other common goods besides the Amazon,” Behar said. Specifically, the company pledged to work to stop deforestation by 2025, while hitting specific targets for the number of bio-ingredients it sources, the investments it makes in local communities and the overall footprint of the nature it has helped to protect.
The firm’s recent acquisition spree will not distract from its commitment to tackling the ongoing deforestation in the Amazon, Behar insists, noting that forest protection should be a priority for all businesses, not just those headquartered in Brazil. “There is no Paris Agreement without the Amazon,” he says. “Every time people talk about planetary boundaries, having an Amazon that is standing is one of its premises. Nothing can be achieved unless the Amazon is there.”
