The EU-Brazil opportunity for digital climate cooperation
Brazil and the EU have different economic, social and political realities, but they share a strong interest: advancing their digital and green transitions. Building on their commitment to interoperable, collaborative and democratic technologies and multilateralism, collaborating on climate digital public infrastructure (DPI) could become a values-based tech offer for an EU-Brazil cooperation. As explored in the recent ECDPM publication From Brazil to the World: Open digital infrastructure for climate cooperation, such systems could help translate climate commitments into practical action globally, creating a concrete opportunity to put the twin transition agenda into practice.
Brazil’s climate DPI starting point
Brazil already has important systems on which to build climate-relevant DPI. The Rural Environmental Registry, known as CAR, is a public electronic registry that collects georeferenced information on rural properties and links land records with environmental data. By 2024, it covered more than seven million properties and around 700 million hectares, providing a basis for land mapping, environmental compliance, access to credit and public programmes. More recently, CAR has been modularised, with open components that could be adapted and reused in other contexts.
Other Brazilian systems complement this picture. DETER, developed by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, processes satellite imagery to identify deforestation hotspots in the Amazon and generate alerts that can support faster enforcement by environmental authorities. This is complemented by PRODES, which calculates Brazil’s official annual deforestation rate, and TerraBrasilis, which presents these data through visual dashboards for policy reporting.
The policy challenge now is how to make these systems more interoperable, trusted, sustainable, resilient, less dependent on foreign technologies and useful beyond Brazil’s borders. This demands partnerships with open standards, distributed architectures, shared oversight and the involvement of civil society and other non-state actors.
From domestic experience to international cooperation
Brazil used its COP30 presidency to frame its domestic systems as part of a wider international climate offer. By combining them with a long-term governance vision, grounded on a modular, multi‑layer Climate DPI and ClimateStack, Brazil is trying to move from national experimentation to international cooperation. The logic is not to export a single Brazilian model, but to help coordinate reusable digital climate components that countries can adapt to their own realities, while building shared standards and governance arrangements.
In Belém, Brazil presented initiatives like the Tropical Forests Forever Facility – which seeks to reward forest conservation through performance-based finance – the Global Mutirão – which aims to mobilise and connect local climate projects, and the Plan to Accelerate Solutions for Climate DPI and Digital Public Goods (DPGs) – a three-year effort to identify, curate and scale climate-relevant digital solutions. In 2026, it continued working on this vision, launching the Open Planetary Intelligence Network (OPIN) in partnership with India, a collaborative initiative that intends to integrate DPI and climate action at a global scale, with special attention to the Paris agreement commitments.
Brazil, with its environmental assets, public digital capabilities and diplomatic weight, is a particularly relevant potential ally.
Why this matters for Europe
For the EU, this agenda is timely. European climate policy increasingly depends on reliable data beyond Europe’s borders. Regulations on green investment and deforestation-free supply chains require credible information from the ground, which could be secured through trusted systems co-developed within strategic digital partnerships. Brazil, with its environmental assets, public digital capabilities and diplomatic weight, is a particularly relevant potential ally.
Climate technology offers a space where the EU and Brazil can invest in alternatives to closed data ecosystems controlled by major tech companies, in a sector where they can lead without competing directly. It could become a practical lab for building sovereign digital infrastructure based on local and public-interest solutions already developed by European and Brazilian ecosystems.
There is already a bilateral basis to build on. Under Global Gateway, the EU and Brazil are making progress on shared priorities with projects to combat deforestation, invest in green hydrogen, increase digital connectivity and support local sustainable economic development, especially in the Amazon region. The EU’s tech business offer under its International Digital Strategy also opens space for a climate DPI agenda to strengthen coordination across these initiatives, connecting them to digital systems that make the green transition more transparent, enforceable and inclusive.
What an EU–Brazil climate digital partnership could do
A focused EU–Brazil digital alliance on climate could start with three practical priorities.
First, both sides could invest in further co-designing the architecture of a broader digital coalition for climate, complementing initiatives already underway, such as OPIN. An EU–Brazil partnership may give this agenda stronger institutional, regulatory and financial foundations, following a model of smart interdependence, in which countries retain authority over their own registries and data, while exposing standardised interfaces for secure verification and exchange. This would help turn climate-relevant digital systems into durable public assets, protected as much as possible from short-term political reversals and easier to connect to existing international climate frameworks.
Second, this initiative could coordinate the already existing ‘global shelf’ of climate-relevant DPIs and DPGs. Many useful systems, such as satellite data, land registries, biodiversity databases, energy interfaces and financial platforms, are already used around the world. What is missing is coordination, including common standards, protocols and mechanisms to adapt these tools to different contexts and multilateral climate priorities. Brazil’s ambitious starting point on climate DPI can help organise these components without imposing a single model, maximising climate action.
Third, climate DPI could support the implementation of EU environmental regulations beyond its borders, such as the EU Deforestation Regulation. Brazil’s model points to how public registries and satellite monitoring could provide more verifiable and interoperable data for supply-chain compliance. More broadly, digital climate reporting and verification requirements could be connected to future clean trade and investment partnerships or other commercial agreements, linking digital infrastructure more directly to environmental commitments.
For the EU, collaboration with Brazil could enable more credible and lower-cost enforcement of green measures, while strengthening its engagement with Latin America and the Global South.
Finally, reciprocity would need to be at the centre of this partnership. For the EU, collaboration with Brazil could enable more credible and lower-cost enforcement of green measures, while strengthening its engagement with Latin America and the Global South. For Brazil, further co-developing climate DPI with the EU could attract investment, reinforce its leadership in digital climate governance and support the internationalisation of its public-interest digital systems. To be successful, the partnership needs shared oversight, participation, transparency, interoperability and public value. If designed carefully, it could help close some of the gaps between climate ambition and implementation, while supporting a democratic and multilateral model of digital governance.
The views are those of the authors and not necessarily those of ECDPM.
