Cities across Latin America have collectively put 10,000 electric buses into public service — a milestone that marks a genuine shift in how the region moves its people and cuts carbon. The figures come from E-Bus Radar and were announced by C40 Cities and the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) at Lat.Bus 2026, the region’s largest transport and mobility event.
At a glance
- Electric buses: More than 10,000 zero-emission buses are now in operation across 80 cities in 13 Latin American countries, with three cities — Santiago, São Paulo, and Bogotá — accounting for more than 7,000 of them.
- CO2 avoided: Operating these buses is estimated to prevent more than 10 million tonnes of CO2 emissions each year across the region.
- São Paulo fleet: The Brazilian city now hosts the region’s second-largest electric bus fleet and delivered 500 new electric buses in a single batch in June 2026 C.E., avoiding an estimated 45,000 metric tons of CO2 annually while cutting diesel use by roughly 20 million liters per year.
How Latin America got here
The shift did not happen overnight. Since 2019 C.E., C40 Cities and the ICCT — working through the ZEBRA Partnership and alongside other organizations — have supported cities including São Paulo, Bogotá, Mexico City, Salvador, and Curitiba in building the financial and regulatory conditions for fleet electrification.
The model that emerged combines firm regulatory requirements for fleet renewal with clean vehicles and a financing structure designed to protect municipalities from the upfront cost burden. It is, in essence, a package that makes the math work for city governments that might otherwise struggle to fund the switch.
Brazil has been a particular engine of growth. Programs like the ZEBRA Alliance and the Mutirão Brazil Program — a joint initiative of C40 Cities and the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy (GCoM) — have brought zero-emission technologies into city transit systems while helping local governments with financial modeling, resource mobilization, and monitoring tools. This is part of a broader wave of climate progress being made in cities and nations worldwide.
What the numbers mean for people
Ten million tonnes of CO2 avoided per year is a large figure in the abstract. In practical terms, it means cleaner air on streets that have long carried some of the worst urban pollution in the Americas. Diesel buses are a leading source of particulate matter in dense cities, and their replacement directly reduces respiratory illness, especially in neighborhoods closest to high-traffic corridors — communities that are often lower-income.
São Paulo Mayor Ricardo Nunes offered a vivid illustration of the scale: the city’s single June 2026 C.E. delivery of 500 new electric buses is, in environmental terms, the equivalent of planting 3.2 million trees per year. That kind of concrete local payoff is helping build political will in cities that are watching São Paulo’s model closely.
Ilan Cuperstein, C40 Cities Regional Director for Latin America, put it plainly: “Reaching 10,000 electric buses in operation shows that the transition to zero-emission transport is no longer a promise but a reality in Latin American cities. What was once the exception is now an expanding public policy, delivering direct benefits for the climate, health, public transport quality and local economies.”
A model other cities can copy
One of the most significant aspects of this milestone is its replicability. The São Paulo financing approach — regulatory pressure plus a structured funding package — is designed to be adapted by other cities, not just celebrated as a one-off success.
C40 and GCoM are actively working to scale this through programs like Brazil Mutirão, connecting local governments with financing institutions and suppliers across the continent. Cuperstein’s message to cities still weighing the transition was direct: “Financing does not have to be a barrier. Tested pathways exist, and the network is ready to support those willing to take them.”
That network matters. The C40 Cities network links more than 100 cities globally, and the ZEBRA Partnership has helped demonstrate that what works in São Paulo can, with adaptation, work in Quito or Lima or Guadalajara. The ICCT’s E-Bus Radar tracking tool gives policymakers real-time data on fleet growth, making it easier to benchmark progress and identify gaps.
What still needs to happen
Ten thousand buses is a milestone, but it is not a finish line. Latin America’s total public bus fleet runs into the hundreds of thousands, meaning the electric share remains a small fraction of the whole. Charging infrastructure, grid capacity, and the supply of skilled maintenance workers all need to grow alongside the fleets — and smaller cities without the financial sophistication of São Paulo or Bogotá face steeper barriers to entry.
The Global Covenant of Mayors and its partners acknowledge that scaling the model from anchor cities to mid-sized and smaller urban areas is the next, harder chapter. Grid readiness in particular varies enormously across the region, and electrification in cities with unreliable power supply poses real operational risk. Tracking how the IEA’s global transport electrification data evolves in Latin America will be one way to measure whether this momentum holds.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Transport & Energy
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- China’s CO2 emissions fall as clean energy surpasses fossil fuels
- Clean energy investment hit a record $755 billion in 2021
- The Good News for Humankind archive on urban transportation
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