The Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) – a major new rainforest protection fund launched by Brazil at COP30 – is unlikely to make payments to rainforest countries until at least 2028, experts said, while it raises funds in financial markets.

The proposed new mechanism aims to pay rainforest countries for achieving low deforestation rates. Rather than depending on grants, the TFFF would seek to raise public and private capital to make investments in financial markets, and then use part of the returns to reward countries which protect their rainforests.

But raising the US$125 billion of public and private investment needed to make meaningful payments could take years, according to Andrew Deutz, managing director of Global Policy and Partnerships at WWF, one of the organisations involved in the fund’s design.

He said it will likely take two or three years for the fund to raise private capital by issuing bonds, invest the money and generate enough returns to make significant payments. “So I don’t think we’re going to see payments to rainforest countries until 2028 or 2029,” Deutz said.

Norway’s climate minister Andreas Bjelland Eriksen, another of the fund’s early backers, told Climate Home News that “the TFFF requires scale, which will take some time”, but added that it “is a historic opportunity” to finance the protection of tropical forests “for generations”.

The delay is not necessarily bad, according to Deutz, as it will allow communities to build capabilities and legal structures to handle the new flow of funds. “There needs to be a capacity-building process over the next couple of years with Indigenous organisations and local communities to be able to manage the flow of funds at that level,” he added.

At the COP26 climate summit in 2021, over 140 countries – covering 85% of the world’s forests – pledged to end deforestation by 2030. At last year’s COP30, the Brazilian government promised to create a roadmap towards ending deforestation by that same date.

But governments are far off track, with a yearly review showing that deforestation rates are currently 63% higher than what they should be to reach this goal. An estimated $570 billion funding gap for nature protection has contributed to the deficient results.

First step: raising $10 billion

While the TFFF has a long-term goal of raising $125bn in public and private capital, its proponents say the key goal for the fund in 2026 will be to raise the total amount of public investment to $10bn so that it can start to scale up.

The fund has already raised $6.7bn, but Norway’s $3bn pledge requires that the TFFF raises about $10bn mostly from other funders by the end of 2026 or they will not invest.

Before scaling up to the long-term $125bn goal – of which $25bn is public and $100bn private – the TFFF will have to prove that it can be successful in paying back investors and channeling funds for rainforest protection. The whole process can take years, Deutz said.

If this $10bn target is reached, the fund could begin raising private finance – up to an estimated $40bn, Deutz said. This initial $50bn tranche would serve to start making investments and show that the model works and can generate returns.

Bjelland Eriksen also said that reaching the $10bn target will be “an important priority” this year. “Only a handful of countries had the opportunities to assess it in detail before the [COP30] Belém summit – now is the time for more countries to do so,” the Norwegian minister said.

Public finance from governments is key for the TFFF model because it would act as a guarantee to lower risk for private investors, something very common in the financial sector, said Charlotte Hamill, partner at hedge fund Bracebridge Capital and one of the fund’s financial advisors, at an event earlier in January in Davos.

“Being able to do this at scale is actually really important, not only to be able to make the payments that are necessary for rainforest preservation but also, in a funny way, it allows you to buy slightly less risky assets because you’re gonna have a much larger pool to buy them off of,” she added.

New contributions?

João Paulo de Resende, TFFF Leader at Brazil’s Ministry of Finance, told Climate Home News that the country will continue fundraising efforts throughout this year, and said he has recently concluded a tour in East Asia speaking with government officials from Japan, South Korea and China.

Conversations with the Chinese government have become “a lot more serious”, said Felix Finkbeiner, founder of the non-profit Plant-for-the-Planet, which operates the online tracking platform TFFF Watch. He added that a Chinese investment would likely be similar in size to the French or German contributions, which would grant the country a seat on the TFFF board. France has pledged a €500m ($578m) investment while Germany has promised €1bn ($1.17bn).

While China is categorised as a developing country at UN climate talks, and thus has no legal responsibility to grant climate finance, the TFFF has been seen as an opportunity for the Asian country to contribute because it’s not an official mechanism within the UN. Deutz said that, for the Chinese government to contribute, they will need reassurance that the funds will not be counted as formal climate finance.

The UK is another of the countries expected to announce a contribution in the coming months, both Finkbeiner and Deutz said. The country announced cuts to climate finance this week as it ramps up defense spending, but Deutz noted that it could still contribute with funds to the TFFF.

“I’m still somewhat optimistic that [the $10bn goal] can happen despite the geopolitical turmoil because the TFFF does not require grant money. We’re not competing with humanitarian assistance,” Deutz explained. “Because governments are being asked to make a loan that would be paid back with interest, this comes out of a different pile of money”.

Multilateral banks such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) also reportedly considered contributions.

Brazil sharing leadership

Despite having led the official launch of the fund and spearheading its fundraising efforts, Brazil is now aiming to “share leadership” as other countries join the TFFF’s steering committee and establish a new board.

De Resende told Climate Home News that “the project no longer belongs solely to Brazil”, and added that the group of countries that have pledged contributions to the TFFF are also now playing a larger role in “finding ways to jointly promote sponsor outreach”.

Deutz said that Brazil wants to move towards a “shared leadership model”. “They are now asking the European countries to have one of them set up to be the co-chairs so that this is not seen as a Brazilian initiative but is rather seen as owned by all of them,” he added.

The fund will now have to form a steering committee, likely chaired by Brazil and one European country, which will instruct the World Bank on setting up the formal structures of the fund.

Bjelland Eriksen said there is “important work” ongoing to formally establish the fund’s investment arm (known as the TFIF), while de Resende said he expects to “have the fund incorporated in some European jurisdiction by the beginning of the second semester.”

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COP30 rainforest fund unlikely to make first payments until 2028

The governor’s office said the city’s two main reservoirs could dry up by May, much sooner than previous timelines. But authorities still offer no plan for curtailment of water use.

By Dylan Baddour

City officials in Corpus Christi on Tuesday released modeling that showed emergency cuts to water demand could be required as soon as May as reservoir levels continue to decline.

Corpus Christi Cuts Timeline to Disaster as Abbott Issues Emergency Orders

Lena Luig is the head of the International Agricultural Policy Division at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a member of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Anna Lappé is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.

As toxic clouds loom over Tehran and Beirut from the US and Israel’s bombardment of oil depots and civilian infrastructure in the region’s ongoing war, the world is once again witnessing the not-so-subtle connections between conflict, hunger, food insecurity and the vulnerability of global food systems dependent on fossil fuels, dominated by a few powerful countries and corporations.

The conflict in Iran is having a huge impact on the world’s fertilizer supply. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical trade route in the region for nearly half of the global supply of urea, the main synthetic fertilizer derived from natural gas through the conversion of ammonia.

With the Strait impacted by Iran’s blockades, prices of urea have shot up by 35% since the war started, just as planting season starts in many parts of the world, putting millions of farmers and consumers at risk of increasing production costs and food price spikes, resulting in food insecurity, particularly for low-income households. The World Food Programme has projected that an extra 45 million people would be pushed ​into acute hunger because of rises in food, oil and shipping costs, if the war continues until June.

Pesticides and synthetic fertilizer leave system fragile

On the face of it, this looks like a supply chain issue, but at the core of this crisis lies a truth about many of our food systems around the world: the instability and injustice in the very design of systems so reliant on these fossil fuel inputs for our food.

At the Global Alliance, a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform food systems, we have been documenting the fossil fuel-food nexus, raising alarm about the fragility of a system propped up by fossil fuels, with 15% of annual fossil fuel use going into food systems, in part because of high-cost, fossil fuel-based inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The Heinrich Böll Foundation has also been flagging this threat consistently, most recently in the Pesticide Atlas and Soil Atlas compendia. 

We’ve seen this before: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked global disruptions in fertilizer supply and food price volatility. As the conflict worsened, fertilizer prices spiked – as much from input companies capitalizing on the crisis for speculation as from real cost increases from production and transport – triggering a food price crisis around the world.

Since then, fertilizer industry profit margins have continued to soar. In 2022, the largest nine fertilizer producers increased their profit margins by more than 35% compared to the year before—when fertilizer prices were already high. As Lena Bassermann and Dr. Gideon Tups underscore in the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Soil Atlas, the global dependencies of nitrogen fertilizer impacted economies around the world, especially state budgets in already indebted and import-dependent economies, as well as farmers across Africa.

Learning lessons from the war in Ukraine, many countries invested heavily in renewable energy and/or increased domestic oil production as a way to decrease dependency on foreign fossil fuels. But few took the same approach to reimagining domestic food systems and their food sovereignty.

Agroecology as an alternative

There is another way. Governments can adopt policy frameworks to encourage reductions in synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, especially in regions that currently massively overuse nitrogen fertilizer. At the African Union fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in 2024, African leaders at least agreed that organic fertilizers should be subsidized as well, not only mineral fertilizers, but we can go farther in actively promoting agricultural pathways that reduce fossil fuel dependency. 

In 2024, the Global Alliance organized dozens of philanthropies to call for a tenfold increase in investments to help farmers transition from fossil fuel dependency towards agroecological approaches that prioritize livelihoods, health, climate, and biodiversity.

In our research, we detail the huge opportunity to repurpose harmful subsidies currently supporting inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides towards locally-sourced bio-inputs and biofertilizer production. We know this works: There are powerful stories of hope and change from those who have made this transition, despite only receiving a fraction of the financing that industrial agriculture receives, with evidence of benefits from stable incomes and livelihoods to better health and climate outcomes.

New summit in Colombia seeks to revive stalled UN talks on fossil fuel transition

Inspiring examples abound: G-BIACK in Kenya is training farmers how to produce their own high-quality compost; start-ups like the Evola Company in Cambodia are producing both nutrient-rich organic fertilizer and protein-rich animal feed with black soldier fly farming; Sabon Sake in Ghana is enriching sugarcane bagasse – usually organic waste – with microbial agents and earthworms to turn it into a rich vermicompost.

These efforts, grounded in ecosystems and tapping nature for soil fertility and to manage pest pressures, are just some of the countless examples around the world, tapping the skill and knowledge of millions of farmers. On a national and global policy level, the Agroecology Coalition, with 480+ members, including governments, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and philanthropic foundations, is supporting a transition toward agroecology, working with natural systems to produce abundant food, boost biodiversity, and foster community well-being.

Fertilizer industry spins “clean” products

We must also inoculate ourselves from the fertilizer industry’s public relations spin, which includes promoting the promise that their products can be produced without heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Despite experts debunking the viability of what the industry has dubbed “green hydrogen” or “green or clean ammonia”, the sector still promotes this narrative, arguing that these are produced with resource-intensive renewable energy or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a costly and unreliable technology for reducing emissions.

As we mourn this conflict’s senseless destruction and death, including hundreds of children, we also recognize that peace cannot mean a return to business-as-usual. We need to upend the systems that allow the richest and most powerful to have dominion over so much.

This includes fighting for a food system that is based on genuine sovereignty and justice, free from dependency on fossil fuels, one that honors natural systems and puts power into the hands of communities and food producers themselves.

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Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems