Carolina Pasquali is executive director of Greenpeace Brazil and Jasper Inventor is executive director of Greenpeace Southeast Asia.
In times like these, we must ask ourselves some fundamental questions. Why is war perpetual? Why do so many people lack the basic necessities of life while oligarchs burn a billion dollars to travel to space for a few seconds? Why do we value dead trees but not living forests?
Something is very wrong in the prevailing global logic and systems. For one, we reward the destruction and degradation of the Earth. Reigning economic logic sees value in logs, gold, palm oil, meat and dairy – but none in the Amazon rainforest, or the great forests of Indonesia or the vast Congo Basin in Africa. This green belt of life crosses oceans and sustains all of us – providing clean air, regulating the weather, storing carbon, and basically ensuring a livable Earth.
Yet we allow these forests to be razed, burned, mined or auctioned for carbon credits while a small minority reap the spoils. This plunder that has hurt Indigenous communities for centuries continues to this day, and now threatens all life on Earth with runaway ecological and climate breakdown.
Globally, we lose the equivalent of 11 football fields of forest with each passing minute, resulting in the release of 2.7 gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere—as much as India’s annual fossil fuel’s emission.
Reward those who protect forests
All this could change if a planned new ecologically-minded investment mechanism, the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF), is successfully developed. Proposed in Dubai at COP28, the Facility is expected to launch when Brazil hosts the next COP in November.
In simple terms, the Facility proposes to help correct the basic illogic of our global economic system. Instead of rewarding the destruction of the forests, we will reward those who protect them. It is an idea supported by Global South nations around the world.
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With an initial investment of $25 billion raised through high-income countries and philanthropic sources, the Facility will act as an investment portfolio, intending to yield returns for loan providers and eventually generating $4 billion annually for nations that protect their tropical forests.
Initial versions of the TFFF concept have been shared publicly and are now in a period of review. As executive directors of Greenpeace offices in tropical forest regions, we welcome the initiative with caution. For too long we have seen empty commitments from companies and governments alike to end deforestation, without success.
Fighting corporate capture
To succeed where so many have failed, the Facility must effectively prevent corporate co-optation and greenwashing. As long-time members of the environmental movement, we have witnessed the steady and alarming pace of corporate capture of our public institutions everywhere.
The last three climate COP negotiations were flooded by polluting corporations. Meanwhile civil society, Indigenous groups, and local communities were sidelined in the halls they built—and none of the powerful nations delivered on any of their promises.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva can be successful in his administration’s proposed Facility if it genuinely centres Indigenous Peoples and local communities. This means recognizing that although they make up just 5% of the world’s populations, Indigenous Peoples safeguard at least a fifth of all land on Earth.
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After years of advocacy by tribes in Papua, Indonesia, local governments have begun issuing formal recognition of Indigenous land rights, a true milestone for climate and biodiversity protection.
In Africa, meanwhile, the Congo Basin is gravely threatened by oil drilling, industrial logging, and agribusiness. Its carbon-rich peatlands, crucial for climate stability, face uncertain futures. And in Brazil, the National Congress seeks to advance bills that open Indigenous lands for exploitation and threaten their very existence.
Put forest communities at the centre
Communities across these forests are gravely threatened by violent and insatiable plunder. Yet they have not turned their backs on the forests. Simply put, this Facility must provide the people connected with tropical forests the necessary respect, audience, and funds to protect their ancestral homes.
We need to see mechanisms for direct access of funds to Indigenous Peoples and local communities, along with their strong participation in governance and decision-making structures.
The Facility must also ensure strong monitoring of deforestation and forest degradation methods, and ensure that destructive industries are ineligible for investments. Investments must not further drive biodiversity loss and the climate crisis, or fuel armed conflicts.
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New opportunity to fund forests
Critics of the Facility have cited its controversial origins as well as its potentially misguided attempt to protect forests through assigning monetary value (often too low). They have raised questions about funding sources, monitoring, and mechanisms.
Yet we urgently need to find ambitious means to preserve our great forests. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are short trillions of dollars and TFFF will not be able to fill this gap on its own. But it is a start – an opportunity and a new model that can ultimately halt deforestation and forest degradation globally.
Set to be launched at November’s COP30 in the heart of the Amazon forest, what better homage to the biggest rainforest in the world than for Brazil to announce a truly effective initiative for a change?
In times like these, at our darkest hour, change isn’t just possible—it’s necessary and inevitable. Brazil’s offering is a sign of the change that is to come. This Facility has a critical opportunity to forge a new path that can benefit all life on Earth.
The post Brazil’s new funding initiative can help bring rainforests back from the brink – if done right appeared first on Climate Home News.
Brazil’s new funding initiative can help bring rainforests back from the brink – if done right
Cleaner cooking projects in the UN carbon market will have to set aside a share of their credits to insure against the risk that the trees they save are lost to fire, drought or logging, after the market’s regulator rejected calls to exempt the sector.
The requirement is part of a new rulebook that the Paris Agreement carbon market regulator – the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body – approved last Friday for programmes that aim to cut emissions by distributing new and cleaner cookstoves in regions that still burn wood or charcoal for cooking.
These are the UN mechanism’s first rulebooks for cookstoves, one of the carbon market’s most popular credit types and also one of its most criticised for overstating climate benefits.
They consist of two methodologies: one for programmes that aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions by distributing more efficient cookstoves that burn less wood or charcoal, and a separate methodology for projects shifting households to lower-emissions cookers running on electricity or liquid petroleum gas (LPG).
Mkhuthazi Steleki, the South African chair of the Supervisory Body, said “this decision gives cleaner cooking projects a new pathway under the UN carbon market, with clear rules to ensure that each credit represents a real and credible emission reduction”.
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Exemption push rejected
More efficient cookstove projects earn credits based on the amount of carbon they save by preserving trees that would have otherwise been cut down and burned for fuel. But if those trees later burn in a wildfire or are logged, the carbon stored would be released anyway, erasing the climate benefits of the credits.
Several carbon credit developers, conservation NGOs and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) disputed that cookstove projects face this risk, in what critics described as a “coordinated lobbying campaign”.
They argued that, unlike forest protection schemes, this type of credit represents a “flow” of avoided emissions rather than a “stock” of stored carbon that can be released. They also warned that requiring a buffer would impose disproportionate costs and undermine the financial viability of these activities.
But the UN carbon market regulator was not persuaded by the argument. It decided that projects would have to protect against this reversal risk by handing over a percentage of credits to a so-called “buffer pool” instead of selling them.
‘New paradigm’
The amount of credits to be given up is calculated by applying different methods for natural risks, like wildfires, droughts or hurricanes, and human-caused ones, such as logging or land clearing.
For natural risks, project developers will need to apply local risk values derived from new modelling published by a group of independent scientists.
Campaigners have broadly welcomed the decision. Federica Dossi, an expert at Brussels-based advocacy group Carbon Market Watch, said it sets a new paradigm for calculating reversal risk based on empirical data. “This approach is grounded in science and we hope to see this now being adopted by other carbon crediting mechanisms in the voluntary market,” she added.
Backers claim this method is more rigorous than current practice in the voluntary carbon market, which largely relies on expert guesswork.
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Pushback over science
As Climate Home News previously revealed, the same industry and NGO groups that sought an exemption from the “buffer pool”, along with some corporate buyers, criticised the use of a study backed by the UN carbon market’s experts that recommended the new risk assessment approach.
The groups pushed for more flexible rules that would have allowed natural risk values drawn from other sources, including national databases, or from the project developers themselves.
While the Supervisory Body rejected this approach, it gave project developers and countries the option to propose alternative values that would first need to be vetted by the mechanism’s expert panel and then approved by the regulator.
A carbon market expert told Climate Home News that, while it is too early to say how this provision will be used, they expect requests will have to be backed up with solid scientific evidence, lowering the risk of unfounded claims.
Policy discounts questioned
To guard against human-caused risks, projects will need to apply a flat 20% value set by the Supervisory Body, at the bottom of the 20-45% range recommended by its technical experts ahead of last week’s meeting.
That value can be further reduced by up to two-thirds if the host country has an emission-reduction plan covering forests, a long-term climate strategy and a framework for the UN’s REDD+ forest protection scheme.
Injy Johnstone, senior research fellow at the Munich-based Max Planck Institute, said that, while these are important governance measures, their existence does not necessarily demonstrate that the underlying risk of forest carbon loss has been reduced.
“It is important to distinguish between evidence of actual risk reduction and assumptions about the effectiveness of policy commitments,” she added.
Moving target
A UN source told Climate Home News that, under the approved formula, improved cookstove projects must set aside at least 9% of credits linked to saved wood if they operate in the lowest-risk areas and the host country can claim all available discounts. The share of credits rises significantly in regions with high natural risk values, such as Guyana, Sri Lanka and Timor Leste, or that do not have REDD+ programmes.
These factors could change in the future as the Supervisory Body asked its technical experts to recommend revisiting the risk values “should credible new evidence arise”.
Climate change is likely to make forest destruction events, such as wildfires or hurricanes, more frequent and more severe in certain regions. Meanwhile, national policies on forest protection can shift significantly depending on government changes.
Johnstone said the UN carbon market needs periodic reassessment to respond to new evidence showing that previously assumed levels of risk were too low.
“The integrity of credits is not guaranteed simply because a reversal risk tool exists,” she added. “The real test will be whether the mechanism provides equivalent atmospheric protection over time, rather than simply introducing another layer of accounting requirements”.
The post UN carbon market forces cookstove projects to protect against forest loss appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN carbon market forces cookstove projects to protect against forest loss
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.
The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining.
Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table.
The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action.
The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation.
Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit.
Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility.
At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.
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The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit
A beacon of love
On an outer island of Fiji, two thousand nautical miles from Sydney, is a shining light of hope and resilience for our troubled world.
The island of Kioa is home to a Tuvaluan community who migrated from their atoll of Vaitupu in the late 1940s. It is a land of warm hearts, big smiles, and deep cultural roots; a place where the sound of a conch still summons the island together, where islanders paddle out to fish in carved outrigger canoes, and healthy happy children walk barefoot to school.
Here, culture is life. Kioans live sustainably through their traditional knowledge and practices. The island is alive with song, dance and the rhythms of a life tied to the tides, the winds, and the seasons.