Brazil made the first financial commitment to its global forest funding initiative Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF), with an initial investment of $1bn, Brazil's president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said this week at UN general assembly meetings in New York.
The TFFF is expected to launch during theUN Cop 30 climate summit in November, in Belem, according to theBrazilian government. The forest funding initiative aims to draw $25bn by November, with plans to attract private investments through initial public investments from supporting countries.
With a target of $125bn in total public and private investments, the TFFF will coordinateforest preservation and social justice for local communities such as indigenous peoples, Lula said. The mechanism will pay up to $4/hectare (ha) preserved, he added.
Local communities in more than 70 countries will receive 20pc of TFFF's total investments, Brazil representatives at the UN said.
Tropical forests within Brazil's Amazon basin, the Congo and Borneo-Mekong basins are the main destinations to these investments. These three basins account for 720mn ha of forest areas, host 26pc of global biodiversity and collectively capture1.2bn metric tonnes (t)/yr of CO2, according to the Summit of the Three Tropical Forest Basins organization.
Brazil, along with Colombia, Ghana, Democratic Republic of Congo (RDC), Indonesia and Malaysia, count on potential investments from Germany, UAE, France, Norway and the UK to successfully launch the program at Cop 30, Brazilian government said. During the TFFF summit at the UN, supporting countries emphasized Brazil's leadership as fundamental to promote a large-scale and predictable funding structure.
Potential sponsor countries also celebrated previous and current investments in the Amazon Fund. The UK and Guyana representatives praised a six-point plan known as Forest Finance Roadmap for Action to halt forest loss and recover degraded lands by 2030, launched today, as a supportive plan to TFFF.
Brazil also leads another forest funding program dubbed Brazil Restoration & Bioeconomy Finance Coalition, which already raised $4bn toward a target of $10bn in public and private funding for land restoration and bioeconomy-related projects by 2030. The program aims to preserve at least 5.5mn hectares and remove and reduce 1.5bn t of CO2 through 2050.
