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The World Bank has confirmed it will serve as trustee and interim secretariat host for the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), as Brazil prepares to launch the showcase investment-driven fund for rainforest protection at next month’s climate summit in the Amazon city of Belém.
With a proposed initial investment of $25 billion from donor countries and $100 billion from private capital, the TFFF seeks to leverage investments in financial markets and channel the returns to countries that can prove they have kept their forests standing.
CEO Ajay Banga announced in September the World Bank’s willingness to host the fund – a role it already fulfills for other climate funds such as the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage. He said the bank’s role would be to “lay the rails and maintain them so the trains can run”, while beneficiary countries and donors should “focus on delivery”.
On Tuesday, the bank gave formal confirmation at a board meeting that it would take on most of the TFFF’s administrative workload – including initial operations and fiduciary reporting – while a permanent institutional home is established.
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Ahead of COP30, Brazil grants Petrobras a licence to drill for oil in Amazon region
Brazil has authorised Petrobras to explore for oil off the Amazon coast, a move campaigners say undermines global climate goals -
COP30 president hints Brazil may be open to a cover decision in Belém
André Corrêa do Lago tells Climate Home News the COP30 talks could conclude with an additional text on key outcomes if countries want it – something Brazil has so far resisted -
Lula says he is “optimistic” about US support for new rainforest fund
The Brazilian president says that for COP30 to be successful, it needs the commitment of all world leaders
Brazilian Finance Minister Fernando Haddad said the World Bank’s decision transforms the TFFF “from an idea into a fully operational reality”, adding that “with this foundation in place, the TFFF is now ready for countries to follow Brazil’s lead by making their own pledges”.
Right way to plug forest finance gap?
The Brazilian initiative comes as developing countries have complained about being unable to access existing forest funds at the Global Environment Facility, while foreign aid budgets which have supported forest conservation shrink in the US and Europe.
Finance needs in developing countries are large and growing, with estimates ranging between $20 billion and $72 billion every year to protect forests. In contrast, in 2022, the total finance destined for forests was just $2.3 billion.
But while the fund has enjoyed expressions of support from both forest-rich and donor countries, it has drawn criticism from some sectors – including over the World Bank’s central role, and whether it has been overly optimistic in the returns it can expect from investing money in emerging economies.
Explainer: Brazil’s “right answer” to forest finance turns to markets to keep rainforest standing
The Global Forest Coalition (GFC) – an international coalition of Indigenous rights NGOs – has pushed back against the TFFF for its high reliance on private investments, urging the World Bank to step back from hosting the fund.
“All the financial schemes put in place for forest conservation supported by the World Bank continue to fail people. They are in place rather to favour capitalist investors instead of solving the deforestation issues,” said Kwami Kpondzo, executive director of Togo’s Centre for Environmental Justice, a member of the GFC alliance.
“TFFF is taking the same direction, where Indigenous peoples and local communities’ rights will be sacrificed once again in the name of conservation,” Kpondzo added in a statement.
Brazil first to pledge TFFF seed capital
The TFFF is being proposed as a blended finance instrument, with funding from both public and private sources. It would seek to directly pay tropical countries that can show effective forest protection.
On paper, the TFFF will get its money similarly to an investment fund. Donor countries and private investors put their money into the fund, which then invests the capital in financial markets. Part of the returns is used to pay back investors and what remains is allocated to forest protection in tropical countries.
In September, Brazil announced a $1 billion contribution into the fund. The starting capital from sponsor countries is seen as a key way of reducing the fund’s risk and improving its credit rating, which would allow for better market returns.
Brazil pledges $1bn in first contribution to COP30 rainforest fund
While no other pledges have been announced so far, donor countries including Norway, Germany, the United Arab Emirates and Britain have voiced support for the new fund and have been involved in its design. They and others are expected to contribute financially, with hopes high that new pledges will be announced at the launch of the TFFF on November 6 at the COP30 leaders’ summit in Belém.
The fund’s concept note proposes an interim hosting period of three years after which its board of directors will assess whether to keep the TFFF housed with the World Bank. It also sets out plans to establish an official secretariat for the fund, which the Brazilian government said would ensure the “TFFF operates with the highest standards of governance, accountability, and predictability”.
The TFFF is expected to be steered by a board of directors from 18 countries, equally split between donors and forested nations. It also foresees the creation of a scientific advisory panel and an advisory council of Indigenous people.
The post Brazil hails World Bank decision to host forest fund ahead of COP30 launch appeared first on Climate Home News.
Brazil hails World Bank decision to host forest fund ahead of COP30 launch
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An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
The post The Land Came First appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
This guest post is by:
- Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor
- Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, chair of mathematical modelling of climate systems at the University of Exeter and part of the Global Carbon Project team.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
The 21st edition of the annual “global carbon budget” report, published today, says that this small decline is largely due to a 1.9% drop in emissions from oil and the energy shock triggered by the Iran conflict and the closure of the strait of Hormuz.
Emissions from coal continue to increase slightly.
The Global Carbon Project’s projections for fossil fuel and cement CO2 emissions in 2026 are preliminary, with a range that spans a fall of -1.5% to a rise of +0.6%.
This means a small increase in emissions can not be ruled out.
Emissions from land-use change, such as deforestation, are projected to rise in 2026.
This is primarily driven by peat fires and forest degradation in south-east Asia and is linked to the development of a strong El Niño event this year.
As a result, total CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and land use are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026 – marginally above 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
Research published alongside the report by the same team in Nature Climate Change finds that the growth in solar, wind and electric vehicles (EVs) now offsets around two-thirds of the emissions that would otherwise come from rising energy demand.
However, the deployment of these technologies is not yet enough to push global emissions into a sustained decline, according to the study.
The 2026 global carbon budget report also estimates that:
- Fossil emissions are projected to fall in China (-0.9%), the US (-1.3%) and the EU (-1.5%) in 2026, but rise by 4.4% in India.
- Oil emissions are projected to fall in every major region, with the largest drop in China (-4.6%).
- Land-use emissions averaged 4.9GtCO2 per year over 2016-25, around 21% lower than the decade before.
- Total CO2 emissions (fossil and land-use) grew by an average 0.3% per year over the past decade (2016-25), compared with 1.7% per year over the decade before.
- The remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C is 150GtCO2, or less than four years of current emissions.
- The land sink in 2025 was the highest on record, rebounding after being weakened during the 2023-24 El Niño. The current El Niño is expected to weaken the land sink in 2027.
- The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is set to reach 427.7 parts per million (ppm) in 2026, 54% above pre-industrial levels.
(For more on previous editions of the Global Carbon Project’s annual report, see Carbon Brief’s coverage in 2025, 2024, 2023 and 2022.)
Total emissions edge up as land-use emissions rise
Total global CO2 emissions, which combines fossil fuels and land-use change, are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026, up from 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
The increase in 2026 comes entirely from a projected rise in land-use emissions, which are more challenging to estimate than fossil emissions.
(The global carbon budget groups emissions from fossil fuels and cement production as “fossil emissions”. Carbon Brief follows this convention throughout this piece.)
If land-use emissions had stayed at 2025 levels, total emissions would have fallen slightly in 2026 to around 42.6GtCO2.
Each edition of the global carbon budget updates the historical record as new data and methods become available. The chart below shows total emissions in this year’s budget compared with the five previous editions.
This year’s estimates of historical fossil emissions are around 0.3GtCO2 per year higher than in last year’s budget.
This is largely because the report now estimates a smaller “cement carbonation” sink in the wake of research published this year in Communications Sustainability. In other words, it estimates that cement is able to s