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The Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) – a new global fund for rainforest protection led by Brazil – can be launched successfully at COP30 with strong political backing from other countries even without reaching its $25-billion target for capital from donor governments, Brazil’s lead finance expert said.
The hope is that other countries will come forward with pledges at the UN climate summit but no minimum set amount is required for the fund to get off the ground, he emphasised.
The TFFF is being structured as a blended finance instrument that could raise $4 billion per year to help keep tropical forests standing by investing in financial markets. The fund’s concept note estimates that, as startup capital, it would need $25 billion from governments and $100 billion from private investors.
João Paulo de Resende, climate and economics advisor at Brazil’s Finance Ministry and its lead TFFF expert, told a webinar hosted by Climate Home News on Thursday that Brazil is seeking clear political support from both donor and rainforest countries for the TFFF at COP30. It is due to be launched at a leaders’ summit in the Amazon city of Belém on November 6.
“What we need to reach by COP is a certain level of commitment that shows that there is enough interest in the international community to make this happen, because we can carry on in the following months,” de Resende said.
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He added that talks are at a mature stage with five potential donor countries – Germany, Norway, UK, France and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Discussions with other potential donors – such as Australia, Japan, Canada and China – have only kicked off recently, he noted.
“We don’t expect to get pledges from these countries that we’ve just started talking to. We can perfectly get those at the COP. And the Brazilian presidency [of COP30] runs through the next year. What we do need to get at the COP is a political message that this is the way forward,” he said.
Brazil is so far the only country to have pledged money to the TFFF, with an initial $1 billion investment announced at the UN General Assembly in New York in September. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has personally promoted the fund at meetings with other world leaders and has been “talking about a commitment” with Indonesia during a state visit to Jakarta this week, de Resende said.
Tørris Jaeger, executive director of the Rainforest Foundation Norway which is promoting the fund, said that in his conversations with Germany’s ministry of finance, “they are asking very tough questions about how the fund is configured.” De Resende joked that “it seems Ethiopia may be more willing to commit to this than the UK and France”, suggesting Brazil is getting impatient with some governments’ reservations.
The TFFF achieved a key milestone ahead of COP30 this week, as the World Bank confirmed it will take on most of the fund’s administrative workload, serving as interim secretariat host and trustee.
Brazilian Finance Minister Fernando Haddad said this transforms the TFFF “from an idea into a fully operational reality”, although de Resende said on Thursday that many of the details will be worked out next year between countries that sign up to the TFFF.
Managing risk in TFFF investments
Despite their vital role in absorbing and storing climate-heating carbon, forests face a $216-billion funding gap for their protection every year, according to a 2025 report from the UN Environment Programme. Existing financing mechanisms like the Global Environment Facility or the Green Climate Fund rely on government development budgets, which de Resende said are unstable.
The TFFF’s approach is to invest initial capital raised from governments and private sources such as sovereign wealth funds and pension funds. The returns would be used to pay developing countries that can demonstrate they are keeping their forests standing and reducing deforestation to an agreed level.
“There is some risk. In very exceptional years like the (COVID-19) pandemic or the 2008 financial crisis you may need to suspend payments,” said the Brazilian government expert. “But it should be a lot more regular than what you see today with government aid.”
Explainer: Can a new climate fund help save the world’s rainforests?
The fund’s main strategy is to invest in emerging market bonds, which are riskier but can generate high enough returns to pay forest countries. The TFFF also has an exclusion policy for investments in polluting industries like oil and gas, which de Resende also said would force investors to take on more risk.
Jaeger highlighted the fund’s role in creating incentives for protecting old-growth forests. At a global level, primary forests have been cleared at concerning rates, with 6.7 million hectares lost in 2024 alone.
“As with any investment there is a risk. But let’s not forget that there’s also a risk on the other end in that we’re not stopping deforestation and these intact forests get lost,” Jaeger told the event.
Indigenous communities call for support
Once TFFF payments are up and running, local communities will need support in building the skills and legal structures needed to access the funds, said Juan Carlos Jintiach, an Ecuadorian Indigenous leader and executive secretary of the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities.
“We have to have an equal level of information. This inter-cultural dialogue is sometimes very challenging for some countries, because all the time they come from the top to the ground. This is not acceptable anymore,” Jintiach said during Climate Home’s panel.
The fund’s proposal foresees that 20% of payments to forest countries will be reserved for Indigenous peoples who are often the ones looking after forests on the ground. Some experts have said this devolved funding could be hard to implement in practice due to a lack of legal and administrative capacity.
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“We need to change the narratives,” the Indigenous leader said. “It’s not good to only look at me as a simple beneficiary. You will look at me as a real partner who can do this together with you, because I’m going to be on the ground giving my life protecting you.”
Pakhi Das, public policy advisor with NGO Plant-for-the-Planet, said the TFFF is an “evolving concept”, adding that concerns from observers have been taken into account in shaping its latest version.
Her organisation has developed a platform called TFFF Watch that will track investments and provide estimates of potential payments to countries with tropical forests.
“There is a very positive notion that [the TFFF] will evolve into something that is tailored-made for the greater good,” Das told Climate Home’s event.
The post Political backing more important than money for new forest fund at COP30, Brazil says appeared first on Climate Home News.
Political backing more important than money for new forest fund at COP30, Brazil says
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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.