Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said on Wednesday he is “optimistic” about a potential donation from the United States to the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), a new international instrument to channel money for forest protection.

During a press conference at United Nations headquarters in New York, Lula said that, if Brazil had already pledged $1 billion to the fund, as it announced on Tuesday, “how much could the U.S. present?”

The TFFF, championed by the COP30 host nation Brazil, aims to raise money to keep forests standing in tropical countries by generating returns on investments in financial markets.

Lula’s comments came just a day after he met his US counterpart – a climate change denier – for the first time in the corridors of the UN. After the brief encounter, described by Lula as “a surprise”, Trump said they had “excellent chemistry.”

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Lula said he was “very happy” with Trump’s comment, as Brazil and the US – the two largest economies in the Americas – have many industrial, technological and scientific interests in common, as well as “in the debate about digital platforms and artificial intelligence”. 

In recent weeks, relations between the two countries have been frosty over Trump’s efforts to slap trade tariffs on Brazil.

Lula said multiple times that a formal meeting between the two leaders could happen soon – also mentioned by Trump – adding he would treat the US president with respect and expect the same from him. “This is what I want, and I believe that’s what he wants too.”

Praise for China’s NDC

Lula also said he had written letters to world leaders, including Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping, to personally invite them to COP30, the UN climate summit happening in November in the Brazilian state of Pará. “The US knows, people know, that the climate change issue is not something that we can joke around, fool around, and the world is in need and suffering,” he said.

On Tuesday in a long speech to the UN General Assembly, right after bumping into Lula, Trump rejected global efforts to transition to renewable energy and urged countries to keep drilling for fossil fuels – dismissing scientists’ warnings that this could set the world on a dangerous trajectory of unfettered warming. He described climate change as “the greatest con job”.

In his press conference as the climate summit continued, Lula also welcomed China’s new emissions-cutting target which its leader unveiled at the start, with the Asian giant pledging a 7-10% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2035 compared to “peak” levels.

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Lula said he was “very happy with” with the announcement, “because China is a very big country”. He mentioned that, during COP15, the UN climate summit in Denmark in 2009 which ended in a failure to seal a new global accord, “the world wanted to throw the responsibility on the shoulders of China”, but that wouldn’t work as industrialised nations have a debt of 200 years of emitting greenhouse gases.

“But in the last years, China has advanced a lot. That’s the truth of the matter,” he added, praising the country’s energy transition and recent declining emissions.

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As in his opening speech at the climate summit, Lula called on all governments to respect what climate scientists say, at the risk of losing credibility if they don’t.

But the only way to ensure that countries actually comply is that every time they make a decision that damages the world, they need to be punished “not in a unilateral manner, but… by the whole collective of countries”, he said.

The post Lula says he is “optimistic” about US support for new rainforest fund appeared first on Climate Home News.

Lula says he is “optimistic” about US support for new rainforest fund