IN PUSH FOR TROPICAL FORESTS FACILITY, BRAZIL BARKS UP THE WRONG TREE

The Amazon Forest

Brazil’s latest climate finance proposal has generated both intrigue and unease across the Global South. The Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF), launched as the country’s flagship initiative ahead of COP30 in Belém, is being sold as a game-changing idea and a permanent financing mechanism for countries that protect tropical forests. It promises a US$125 billion Tropical Forest Investment Fund (TFIF) designed to reward nations that keep their forests standing, with at least 20 percent of payments going to Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs). On the surface, it sounds like exactly the kind of innovative finance mechanism the world needs to value forests as global public goods, but when one peers beneath the glossy green wrapping, a more complicated picture emerges; one that raises difficult questions about governance, fairness, and whether this model risks repeating old mistakes in new packaging 

Brazil’s Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF) rests on a complex architecture that blends public capital with private investment, leveraging financial markets to fund conservation. The basic idea is that donors or sponsors would provide junior capital, or money that takes the first loss, while tropical forest countries issue sovereign bonds, attracting institutional investors who purchase these instruments for steady returns. The profits from these investments, in theory, would then finance payments to countries for keeping forests intact. The premise borrows heavily from the logic of “blended finance”, using concessional public funds to draw in private capital. 

Yet critics, particularly in the developing world, argue that much of this financial wizardry may be smoke and mirrors. The money “generated” might not actually represent new or additional finance. Instead, the returns could effectively come from the same developing countries issuing the bonds, a kind of financial recycling that turns tropical forest countries into both lenders and borrowers in their own forest protection schemes. In essence, they could end up paying themselves to conserve their own forests, while institutional investors and financial intermediaries skim off profits along the way. 

This is not a trivial concern. For the Congo Basin countries, home to the second-largest tropical rainforest in the world and a critical carbon sink, the TFFF’s implications are enormous. These nations already face crushing fiscal pressures, limited access to concessional finance, and dwindling climate support from developed countries. They cannot afford to participate in arrangements that obscure who is paying whom, or that deepen financial dependency through complex instruments designed to look innovative but lacking genuine equity or transparency. 

There is also a geopolitical layer to the critique. By defining “tropical forest countries” narrowly around rainforest biomes, the TFFF risks excluding much of Africa’s forest wealth, such as the dryland woodlands of the Sahel, the miombo and mopane forests of southern Africa, and the mangrove ecosystems that line its coasts. These are vital carbon stores, biodiversity reservoirs, and livelihood anchors. A mechanism that sidelines them would fragment Africa’s forest agenda and betray the spirit of ecological inclusivity that should underpin global forest finance. The narrowness of the TFFF’s definition thus reflects not just an ecological oversight, but a political one: a model that privileges certain regions while marginalising others. 

Even more worrying is the proposed governance structure. The TFFF and Tropical Forest Investment Fund (TFIF) are to be managed through separate but related entities, with donors, private financiers, and large conservation NGOs holding disproportionate influence. The TFIF’s board, which would oversee the investment fund, is expected to be dominated by sovereign sponsors and financial managers, not by the tropical forest countries whose resources form the basis of the scheme. The facility’s architects speak of efficiency and “investor confidence”, but this design looks uncomfortably familiar to those who remember the top-down structures of the Bretton Woods institutions. The absence of clear accountability to the countries and communities meant to benefit from it suggests that the TFFF could easily drift into a donor-driven mechanism dressed in green finance rhetoric. 

For African countries, this should raise immediate red flags. Forest finance cannot be another arena where financial elites dictate terms while developing countries surrender policy autonomy. Any forest-related mechanism must remain anchored in multilateral governance, under the authority of the UNFCCC, its Paris Agreement, and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The Green Climate Fund (GCF), Global Environment Facility (GEF), and the new Loss and Damage Fund already exist to channel finance transparently through these systems. Establishing a facility like the TFFF outside the UN system risks creating a parallel structure that fragments global finance and reduces oversight. Africa has already learned the hard way that when climate funds drift outside the multilateral orbit, accountability weakens and conditionality tightens. 

Proponents of the TFFF describe it as a long-term, performance-based trust fund, offering predictable finance in exchange for measurable conservation outcomes. But the “performance” framing itself is problematic. It anchors forest value narrowly on carbon metrics, or how much deforestation is avoided and how much carbon is sequestered, and links funding to compliance with externally determined benchmarks. That logic mirrors the flawed market mechanisms of the past decade, including REDD+, which often failed to deliver real benefits to local communities while allowing emitters in the North to offset pollution. The financialisation of forests — turning them into tradable carbon assets — risks commodifying ecosystems and reducing complex ecological and social systems to lines on a spreadsheet. 

For Africa, where forests are deeply enmeshed with livelihoods, culture, and survival, this could be disastrous. Forests here are not just “carbon stocks”; they are communal lands, grazing areas, sources of fuelwood, medicine, and food security. Financialising these landscapes could lead to new forms of enclosure and conflict as investors seek to secure carbon rights or restrict local use to meet conservation “performance” metrics. The TFFF’s reliance on markets and private finance could therefore deepen, not reduce, social vulnerability. 

Critics have described this emerging pattern as a form of “ecological structural adjustment”, the same austerity logic of the 1980s, now applied through environmental metrics. Instead of GDP targets, countries are judged on deforestation rates or carbon absorption; instead of fiscal conditionalities, they face “climate performance” requirements. The controlling hand may no longer be the IMF, but the logic remains the same: external actors dictate policy through financial levers. 

African negotiators should thus approach the TFFF with both diplomacy and vigilance. They can acknowledge Brazil’s ambition, after all, a stable, well-funded mechanism for forest protection is badly needed, but they must insist that it be multilateral, transparent, rights-based, and equitable. Governance must include equal representation of tropical forest countries, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities. Decision-making cannot be the preserve of donors or financial institutions. 

Equally crucial is transparency. The TFFF currently lacks clear mechanisms for public reporting, independent monitoring, or grievance redress. Without such safeguards, it risks repeating the governance failings that have plagued other large-scale funds. Africa should demand that any facility dealing with forest finance adhere to the principle of free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC), ensure tenure security for communities, and provide participatory monitoring frameworksthat allow those affected to shape how the fund operates. 

Then there is the issue of coherence. The UN system already has multiple established mechanisms for forest-related finance. The TFFF risks diverting attention and resources away from these, creating duplication and inefficiency. A fragmented system weakens developing countries’ bargaining power, allowing donors to cherry-pick where to channel funds, often outside the COP’s oversight. Africa should reaffirm that all forest finance should flow through, or remain accountable to, the Financial Mechanism of the UNFCCC and its Paris Agreement, ensuring consistency and collective ownership. 

Beyond governance and finance, there is the question of justice. The TFFF’s framing subtly shifts responsibility for protecting the world’s forests onto the shoulders of the developing world. Yet it is global consumption of beef, soy, palm oil, timber, and minerals that drives most deforestation. A fair mechanism would address these systemic drivers by holding importing countries and corporations accountable. Instead, the TFFF’s performance-based design could end up penalising producer countries for deforestation driven by demand in the Global North. This is a moral inversion: the victims of the system are made to carry the costs of its reform. 

To truly serve global equity, any forest finance mechanism must begin from historical responsibility, the principle that those who caused the climate crisis should bear the greatest burden of financing solutions. It must also prioritise public, grant-based finance, not speculative instruments dressed up as innovation. Forest protection cannot rely on profit margins; it must rely on solidarity. 

Africa’s position is therefore both principled and strategic. It can support Brazil’s broad ambition to elevate forests in global climate finance, but only under certain conditions: 
First, governance must be under UNFCCC and CBD authority, not external boards dominated by donors. Second, the scope must include all forest types — dryland, savannah, and mangrove ecosystems — reflecting Africa’s full ecological diversity. Third, the finance must be predictable, grant-based, and non-market, avoiding carbon offsetting or debt-linked mechanisms. Fourth, sovereignty and rights must be safeguarded: forest policies must remain nationally determined, with FPIC and equitable benefit-sharing guaranteed, And, finally, accountability and justice must be central. 

At its heart, the debate over the TFFF is a struggle over what kind of climate finance future the world wants. One model, embodied by the TFFF’s current design, treats forests as financial assets and conservation as a market opportunity. The other, which Africa champions, views forests as global commons whose protection is a collective responsibility, grounded in equity and justice. 

Brazil may see its proposal as a grand solution, but without reform, it risks becoming another instrument of green financialisation, an elegant mechanism that moves money but not power. If the TFFF is to stand for “forests forever,” it must first stand for fairness forever. Otherwise, Brazil may find that in trying to save the world’s forests, it has barked up the wrong tree.