ONE Amazon’s Peter Knez: “We think of the Amazon as a nature based asset”
ONE Amazon’s totalitarian plans for the Amazon rainforest.
ONE Amazon is a US-based company with a US$1 trillion plan to save the Amazon rainforest. The company has plans to transform “the Amazon biome into a digital asset security for sustainable environmental impact”.
When it launched at COP28 in Dubai, ONE Amazon announced that it would create 750 million digital asset securities”, or one for each hectare of the Amazon biome.
The company’s website currently gives the area of the Amazon as 5.5 million square kilometres, which is 550 million hectares.
The company’s first act was in September 2022, when ONE Amazon signed an agreement with the Shuar Federation in Ecuador. It was heavily biased against the Indigenous Shuar communities and in favour of ONE Amazon.
You can read the agreement and a critique of it here:
Satellogic
In April 2024, Satellogic Inc. signed a letter of intent with ONE Amazon to support the creation of the “Internet of Forests”. Satellogic describes this as “a large-scale sensor network that, along with machine intelligence infrastructure, will be used to monitor key variables within the Amazon rainforest”.
Satellogic USA Inc. was incorporated in the tax haven of Delaware in June 2016. Emiliano Kargieman is the company’s CEO. “We are building the next disruption in our field,” he told Bloomberg in 2022.
We are building a constellation of satellites that will allow us to remap the entire surface of the planet every single day. This is really going to change the way relate to the planet. In these times of increased complexity and global volatility, being able to see what is happening will not only help us make more informed decisions but also closing the loop with how those decisions end up affecting things on the ground.
The panopticon of forests might be a better description.
The chair of Satellogic’s board is Steven Mnuchin, who was Secretary of the Treasury under Donald Trump’s first presidency. Mnuchin worked for Goldman Sachs for 17 years, followed by a series of hedge funds, investment funds, and a film financing company.
Satellogic is also involved in GREEN+ which Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin describe as “The carbon credit coup”. Here’s REDD-Monitor’s take:
MIT Labs, Veea, and AECOM
In October 2024, ONE Amazon announced “the launch of the world’s first Internet of Forests”.
A company called One Amazon Empreendimentos Sustentáveis Ltda. based in São Paulo, has a trademark application for “I.O.F. Internet of Forests”.
ONE Amazon’s press release included a photograph of the “Internet of Forests installation process”:
ONE Amazon claims to be working with MIT Media Lab’s City Science Group on the Internet of Forests. In December 2024, REDD-Monitor wrote to Kent Larson, the Director of the City Science Group at the MIT Media Lab, to ask him some questions about the collaboration with ONE Amazon. Larson is listed on ONE Amazon’s website as a member of the company’s Global Advisory Board. Larson did not reply.
According to ONE Amazon’s October 2024 press release a company called Veea is using its “hybrid edge-cloud computing technology” to facilitate “real-time data processing and edge AI applications in the rainforest, using mesh clusters to connect various sensors across vast areas”.
And an infrastructure consulting firm called AECOM is “instrumental in planning and managing the deployment of the IoF’s™ physical and digital networks”.
Gorilla Technology Group
In February 2025, a company called Gorilla Technology Group put out a press release announcing an agreement with ONE Amazon. Gorilla’s press release states,
This multi-billion-dollar initiative is not only the world’s first, but also the world’s largest deployment of environmental biodegradable sensors, creating an unprecedented real-time intelligence network across the Amazon.
The press release came with a photograph of five men in suits and one in a checked jacket, all apparently very happy with the deal:
Gorilla was founded in 2001 in Taiwan. The company listed on Nasdaq in 2022. Gorilla Technology was incorporated in the UK in August 2022 and moved its headquarters to London in 2023.
The company provides services for what it calls the “Global Smart Cities market”, including AI driven cybersecurity and AI driven analytics.
Here’s a graphic that Gorilla’s CEO Jay Chandan used in a December 2024 interview to illustrate what his company does in urban settings:
This is disturbing close to totalitarian digital surveillance. ONE Amazon aims to bring Gorilla’s surveillance platform to create a “comprehensive monitoring system” for the Amazon rainforest.
In Gorilla’s press release, Chandan says,
As a key architect of ONE AMAZON’s digital and economic infrastructure, Gorilla is deploying cutting-edge AI, data intelligence and security solutions to enable the Amazon Rainforest to be monitored, protected and valued at an unprecedented scale. By digitising nature itself, we are building a system where sustainability is directly tied to financial growth, ensuring long-term impact for both investors and the planet.
Peter Knez and John Eleoterio
In June 2024, ONE Amazon gave a presentation at a Future Investment Initiative Institute event in Rio de Janeiro. Peter Knez is ONE Amazon’s chairman.
Knez was BlackRock’s Global Chief Investment Officer. Before that he worked for Lincoln Capital Management and Goldman Sachs.
Knez makes no effort to disguise the totalitarian aspect of ONE Amazon’s plans. He starts his speech in Rio de Janeiro by asking us to imagine whether an “enlightened monarch” would spend US$1 trillion to save the Amazon rainforest.
The theme continues through his speech. We’ve already “datified” humans, he says (“they kind of know what we read, and what we like, and who we’re with, and where we are”) so now we should do the same to nature.
And “we have to bring market forces” because “otherwise it won’t be successful”. That’s not an argument for the market. It’s just an ideological belief, from someone who has profited massively from the market.
Knez’s full speech is transcribed below, followed by John Eleoterio’s speech. Eleoterio is Managing Director of Global Banking and Markets at Goldman Sachs, which is the “structuring partner” for ONE Amazon.
Eleoterio talks about using the “Internet of Forests” for telehealth and tele-education.
Neither Knez nor Eleoterio makes any mention of how ONE Amazon plans to carry out a process of free, prior and informed consent with the more than 30 million people who live in the Amazon rainforest. They are far more focussed on finding a way to profit from the Amazon rainforest than on the rights of the people living there.
Peter Knez, Chairman, ONE Amazon: Just imagine that the entire planet was run by an enlightened monarch. And that enlightened monarch woke up one day and its scientists came to it, came to them, and said, ‘Oh, by the way, this is the Amazon rainforest. Well 25% of it’s been destroyed.’ Would that enlightened monarch spend a trillion dollars to save the Amazon rainforest? Of course it would. It’s the lungs of the planet.
So that gives you some sense of just the zip code that the Amazon rainforest is in, in my view. Now, ONE Amazon’s approach to that was to create a partnership, a platform of partners, many of whom you see here today, some you don’t, in order to solve that problem. To fill that void, essentially. And we start by partnering with the enlightened governments of Colombia, of Brazil, by which, in partnership with them, to solve this problem.
So, the other thing that ONE Amazon is doing is, we think of the Amazon as a nature based asset. We think of it as an asset. In that sense the ecosystems of the Amazon rainforest, the biome, they give off goods and services, whether that’s the timber, whether that’s the fish, the seafood, whether that’s water purification, and pollination, they give off a set of services, goods and services, just like other assets. So they deserve to be valued right alongside traditional financial assets.
So instead of there just being human capital like everybody in this room and the people sitting on this panel, instead of there just being produced capital like this building, there’s natural capital. There’s three sources of capital. And so when you take this approach, then you start thinking about OK how do I create an asset out of the Amazon rainforest? How do I price this asset that we think is so undervalued? Right?
Well the challenge with nature based assets is that birds fly, and fish swim, and wind blows, and water flows. And so the owners of this asset, the governments or the Indigenous tribes, can’t control the benefits that’s being generated by that asset. So it’s a classic market failure. Right?
And so you have to fix that market failure in order to price the asset. Right? And so they way ONE Amazon has approached that, is and fortunately the technology now exists to actually solve this problem.
So we start by creating an asset out of a hectare of the rainforest. Well, in order for an asset to get priced, you first have to give access to the asset. I can’t access the asset it’s not going to ever have any liquidity. So the way we give access to a pool of investors is we digitally represent that hectare of the rainforest. We tokenise it. Using modern digital technologies. Right?
It’s a really actually a real use case of the technology, in my view. Right? So now we have a digital representation of a hectare of the rainforest, right, which you can access 24/7, at a low cost. But investors have to know what’s happening to that asset. So we take that tokenised hectare of the rainforest and we put it on a blockchain. So blockchain technology gets used for a lot of things that I think are kind of more or less irrelevant. But this use case, you have an immutable transparent track record from everything that happens to that token, from A to Z.
So now you have a digital representation, that gives you access to potential liquidity. You have that token on a blockchain, so you have immutability and auditing of that asset, any activity of that token. But lastly, you need to be able to understand what it is that token represents. Right? So you have to datify that hectare of the rainforest, right? Because after all, financial products in their simplest forms are just packaged up data that trades in a regulatory framework. That’s really all they are. Right? They’re claims. They’ve been datified. Right? These are claims. So essentially you have to datify that.
ONE Amazon does that through something called the Internet of Forests. Basically what the Internet of Forests is, is an infrastructure of sensors from bio-sensing, to environment sensing, to social and environmental sensing that can basically collect data at scale both granularly and macroly.
So in that sense, you’re basically starting to datify nature. So, in fact, for that last 10, 15, 20 years we’ve datified homo sapiens a lot, they kind of know what we read, and what we like, and who we’re with, and where we are, and stuff like that. But we’re in the early, early innings of datifying nature. But the technology exists to datify nature and it’s improving dramatically every week.
So now, if you think what ONE Amazon has done, it’s taken and it’s created a digital asset, a token, a digital representation of the hectare, it’s basically put that token on a blockchain to create transparency and auditability and then it’s datified that hectare and what’s that the claim of that hectare.
So now, we can take that digital asset and we can put it on an exchange and start to trade it. And so we bring market forces into the problem of creating sustainability and saving the rainforest. Right?
And so that’s, in our view, we think that in order to solve the climate change problem, in order to save an asset like the rainforest, we have to bring market forces. Otherwise it won’t be successful. And that’s what ONE Amazon has done.
John Eleoterio, Managing Director, Goldman Sachs Sustainability Banking Group: One of key fundamental problems that I’ve seen over the last 25 years is, we’re trying to look at nature-based solutions as some sort of unique product. It is a unique product, but in order to bring the markets to bear from a financing capability, from a product capability, we’re really looking at it the same as every other financial product that out there. The markets need data. I think there will be data. Data brings identification, it brings verification, and transparency, and products develop around that.
What we’re seeing as one of the biggest challenges in the market on the nature-based side is really a function of yes, regulatory dynamics, you have various types of regimes on the carbon side, on compliance sides, on technical credits, but the fundamental nature of each of those problems is started with a, either, lack of data, lack of verification, lack of ability to demonstrate permanence.
So it really hinges on the data. The ability of Internet of Forests and the ability of incorporating today’s technology at a low cost. Having the ability to tokenise, having the ability to go into a hectare by hectare asset level, you’re providing investors with an enormous amount of data to identify what is the progress, what is going on there?
And then the question is, what’s the revenue model when you’re thinking of the challenge of the nature-based. So what does that bring, and I’m really looking at this from a project perspective of ONE Amazon as well, is when you’re looking at the value creation of that data and you’re looking at that, and then you can start to look at investing, think of the Amazon as encyclopedic knowledge that has not yet come to market.
Yes, we need to preserve the Amazon, but the Amazon is an educator. So by pulling that datastream, you’re creating multiple opportunity sets on different revenue streams that can be redeployed into other agroforestry, reforestation type programmes, because of the knowledge base that you’re getting from the Amazon.
But the value of ONE Amazon, it’s also creating project capability to invest in energy transition projects. When you’re looking at projects and the ecosystem of permanence it needs to take an ecosystem of the people in those communities from energy transition. Many folks look at this from a co-benefit standpoint, but it’s so much deeper than that.
If you’re creating an ecosystem with the data, with the jobs, with the information, and extending even that data capture to that, investors have line of sight to the true impact that they’re having. They can see a revenue model that is diverse, you’ll see known and unknown revenue models coming out of this data. You’ll see verification that will help feed the regulatory environment with regards to how to react, how to verify, how to have transparency. And that’ll lead to excellent worlds of different amounts of information that’s needed to establish markets.
You know every commodity started in a bilateral type discussion and then evolved over time with data into multitude of products and then that brought investors into those communities. So we do see that as the key anchor to bringing information and data. And then from the project perspective we’re looking at the value creation of ONE Amazon and in particular given my energy transition background is creating ecosystems around preservation and creating the co-investment in those communities that will demonstrate permanence.
If you’re investing in those communities, if you’re bringing distributed power, distributed energy, with regards to telehealth and tele-education into those communities. That is true permanence. So you’ll be able to create an ecosystem of stability and investment in that and that all interconnects with Internet of Forest. It’s not only the capturing of that data, where you’re deploying that data, how’s that feeding into the regulatory environment, how are we helping investors who are far off in other markets with verification and accountability and an accounting trail of that data, but also the creation of new revenue streams and new investments back into those communities.
Wow! This is genuinely scary.
Heaven help us… its our only hope.