China endorsed Brazil’s $125 billion Tropical Forests Forever Facility at a sideline event in New York on Tuesday, lending weight to a flagship fund that rewards nations for preserving tropical forests and injecting fresh momentum into one of the main initiatives set to debut at COP30 in Belem this November.
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The TFFF, devised by Brazil with support from the World Bank and international partners, will invest in low-risk assets and channel part of the returns to tropical countries at up to $4 per hectare of standing forest.
Payments will depend on keeping annual deforestation below 0.5 per cent, with penalties for forest loss and degradation. At least one-fifth of the resources will go to Indigenous peoples and local communities.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva announced that Brazil would put in $1 billion of its own funds, making it the first contributor to the TFFF. “This is not charity. It is an investment in humanity and in the planet against the threat of devastation by climate chaos,” he declared, urging other governments to table equally ambitious pledges before COP 30.
He emphasised that the scheme had been shaped with input from Indigenous groups, civil society and international organisations, and was intended to provide predictable, long-term finance for tropical forest nations.
More than 1.1 billion hectares of tropical forest span 73 developing countries, Lula noted, adding that secure resource flows could be transformative. He underlined that the Amazon, Congo and Borneo-Mekong basins together account for 80 per cent of the world’s remaining tropical forests.
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