On the morning of 26 August, flash floods surged through a Himalayan border region of Nepal and the Chinese region of Tibet, killing more than 1,300 people, with thousands still missing.
In the days since the floods, scientists have examined satellite imagery, drone footage and seismic data in order to understand and explain the forces behind the event.
While initial theories pinned the flood on a glacial collapse, scientists now understand the event as a “multi-hazard cascade”, which began with a bedrock collapse.
Some climate sceptics have tried to use this to falsely claim that human-caused climate change had no impact on the event.
Yet, scientists have noted that, while no formal attribution study has been carried out thus far, warming is making such ice-rock avalanches in the region more likely.
Researchers have highlighted how rapid warming is dramatically reshaping Asia’s high-mountain region – and identified rising temperatures, glacier retreat and permafrost thaw as factors that may have all contributed to the disaster.
Balendra Shah, Nepal’s prime minister, has called the floods a “serious signal that…the risks we must bear in the Himalayan region are increasing” due to climate change.
Here, Carbon Brief unpacks what scientists currently know about the causes of the catastrophic event and what they can – and cannot – say about the role of climate change.
What happened?
A report published on 28 August by the HiRisk scientific consortium of high mountain experts detailed the events that led to the flash floods.
It said that events were set in motion on 26 August when a mass of bedrock, as well as the glacier ice on top of it, broke off a slope of Langtang-Lirung mountain in the Nepalese Himalaya, plunging from approximately 5,200 metres above sea level to the valley floor at 3,000 metres.
The landslide shook the ground hard enough that, at 8:37am Nepal local time, the US Geological Survey (USGS) initially reported a magnitude 4.4 earthquake. Later that day, it clarified the shaking was caused by glacier collapse and debris flow, equivalent to a magnitude 5.2 earthquake.
On the valley floor, the melting ice, water and debris slammed into the Lhende Khola river, a high-altitude river that runs along Nepal’s border with China.
Known downstream as the Bhote Koshi river in Nepal and the Poiqu or Poqu in China, the Lhende Khole feeds a network of rivers across Nepal and the Chinese region of Tibet, including the Trishuli river. (In China, the Lhende Khola is known as the Donglin Tsangpo.)
A large “debris” lake was briefly formed on the valley floor. When this lake burst, a wall of water and rock travelled downstream, killing more than a thousand people and destroying settlements, roads, bridges, hydropower plants and border posts across Nepal and Tibet.
HiRisk said that the floodwave travelled down rivers as fast as 30km an hour (around 19 miles per hour) and reached Mugling – a Nepalese town more than 130km downstream – at around 1pm local time.
A separate report from the Center for Land Surface Hazards in the US noted that the flood moved “exceptionally fast, was sediment-laden and extreme in scale”. For example, in the Nepalese municipality of Galchhi, the Trishuli river rose by nine metres in 30 minutes, it said.
Writing in the Conversation, Dr Umesh Haritashya, a glaciologist at the University of Dayton in Ohio, explained that the disaster “wasn’t finished when the first wall of water passed [on 26 August]”.
He continued that a new “barrier lake” – estimated to hold a few million cubic metres of water – had developed in a location where two rivers meet in Tibet before crossing into Nepal. This lake burst on 28 August and the river rose again, he said.
On 4 September, the chief of Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, told Reuters that property and infrastructure worth “at least” $2.5bn (£1.9bn) had been lost. Dharma Raj Upreti estimated the cost to build roads and temporary shelters, provide drinking water and restore power would be around $53m (£39m).
How did bedrock collapse trigger the flash floods?
In the immediate aftermath of the floods, initial reports suggested that the trigger was a collapsing glacier or earthquake in the high mountains of Nepal.
After confirming that a seismic tremor was as a result of falling rock and ice, the USGS said the trigger was likely a “glacial collapse and debris flow”. This was widely picked up by the media.
Subsequently, satellite imagery revealed that an “enormous chunk of the mountainous bedrock” beneath the glacier had also given way, reported the New York Times.
Dr Kristen Cook, a geomorphologist at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France, told the newspaper:
“The rock that the glacier was sitting on collapsed…It was a much larger collapse than we were initially able to see in the satellite imagery.”
The result was a “deluge of rock and ice, which pulverized into mud and water as it surged down the mountainside”, the newspaper said.
Dr Jakob Steiner a geoscientist at the University of Graz in Austria, tells Carbon Brief:
“It was not a glacier that collapsed. It was the mountain below the glacier that collapsed and the glacier had no other chance but to go with it because it was sitting on top of it.
“The trigger for that is something that we are not 100% certain about, but, in the end, it very much looks like simply a mechanical failure of the rock material because of stressors that have built up over a long period of time.”
Failures of “bedrock” – the hard, solid rock that sits below looser rocks and soil – are an “increasingly common occurrence”, says Prof Bethan Davies, a professor of glaciology at Newcastle University. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These massive landslides occur in mountain regions, commonly following rapid deglacierisation [the melting away of a glacier]. Similar events happened in the Chamoli event in 2021 [in the Indian Himalaya] and in the Blatten landslide last year in Switzerland. They’ve also occurred recently in Alaska.”
With a shift in focus from the failure of a glacier to the bedrock underneath, some climate sceptics seized on the development to falsely claim that climate change had not played any role in the disaster.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program, on Twitter, as well as former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley in the Spectator.
However, scientists have highlighted the likely contribution of rapid warming in the region. These factors include the thawing of permafrost and glacier retreat. (For more, see sections below).
Fundamentally, “this would have been a much less significant tragedy if it had been just a rock-slope failure”, notes Davies.
The initial landslide took a mixture of rock and ice into a valley that “contains buried ice” as well, she says, providing the water that “resulted in the hyperconcentrated flow, which took so many lives”.
How have temperatures risen in the affected region?
Global temperatures have risen by roughly 1.4C since the pre-industrial period. However, this increase is not uniform across the planet, with some regions warming faster than others.
A study published in Global and Planetary Change in June 2026 investigated changes in the Langtang catchment – a river basin in central Nepal, in which the Langtang-Lirung mountain is located, which eventually drains into the Ganges. Around one-quarter of the area is made up of glaciers.
The paper found that glacial areas of the catchment – found at 4,000 metres above sea level – warmed at 0.31C per decade over 1960-2023. This was “more than three times” the rate observed at a lower elevation weather station, the authors said.
Looking in more detail at the site of the glacial collapse, Dr Robert Rohde, chief scientist for Berkeley Earth, used ERA5 reanalysis data to show how temperature has changed at the 5,200-metre elevation site where the mass of ice and rock broke loose.
Rohde’s analysis found that June-to-August temperatures have been rising at the site of the glacier collapse since the year 1940, with 2026’s summer the fourth warmest on record, behind 2024, 2025 and 2022. This is shown in the graph below.
Rohde also found that the days leading up to the disaster recorded the hottest August temperatures ever experienced at the site. This is shown in the graph below.
On social media, Rohde stated:
“Given the warming trend, this Nepali glacier had probably been thinning and weakening for years, or even decades. But it ultimately failed during the warmest week in one of its warmest years on record. It would be a hell of a coincidence if global warming wasn’t at least partially to blame.”
How have rising temperatures affected mountain stability?
Many experts have linked warming temperatures in the region to thawing permafrost – ground that has been frozen for at least two consecutive years, whose thickness ranges from less than one metre to more than a kilometre.
Steiner is part of a research team that has been using sensors to monitor permafrost in the region since 2014. He tells Carbon Brief that it is “pretty clear” the permafrost has been thawing “very actively” at elevations as high as 5,200 metres above sea level “for many years”. He adds:
“This means that the ground has, over the last decades, moved from being in a solid state into – at least, periodically during the warm season – patchy ground where some is frozen and some isn’t…
“If you have frozen ground next to non-frozen ground, you have dynamics happening between that because there are different densities and there’s movement happening, which is conducive to interventional failure – and that we know from many other cases.”
Davies also points to the “degradation” of perennially frozen ground as a factor in the disaster:
“This permafrost acts as a glue to hold together the rocks and, as it melts, the rock can become weakened.”
Permafrost thaw can also result in saturated ground, says Davies, which adds “pressure in the joints” of rock and can “facilitate” failure. She continues:
“Sources of the water include melting permafrost and meltwater from the overlying glacier. We know that this event happened during a period of warmth, but in the absence of heavy precipitation, pointing to ice melt as the source of water.”
A 2025 study of rock and ice avalanches in High Mountain Asia found that more than two-thirds started in areas “where permafrost is probable”.
How have glaciers retreated in the affected region?
Glaciers – frozen rivers of ice holding three-quarters of the global freshwater supply – are extremely vulnerable to climate change.
In the Himalaya, the rate of glacier retreat has doubled since the late 20th century, according to a 2019 study in Science Advances.
The Global and Planetary Change study found that glacier area loss rates in the Langtang catchment increased more than fourfold from 1964 to 2023 – with melting accelerating after 2000.
It added that glaciers in the region also experienced “fragmentation” and “widespread thinning” over this period.
The study noted that this loss “coincided with elevation dependent warming”.
The figure below provides an overview of glacier loss in the Langtang catchment over 1964-2023, with orange, red and dark red indicating areas of retreat.
In addition, green dots note points of glacier fragmentation, while blue dots show separation and pink show disconnection.
In comments released by the University of Reading, Prof Maria Shahgedanova, a climate scientist researching climate impacts on mountain glaciers, said that the glacier involved in the floods had “retreated by approximately 450 metres between 1990 and 2020”.
She adds that this “potentially reduce[d] the mechanical support provided by the glacier to the underlying rock slope”.
Speaking to Carbon Brief, Davies reiterates that the retreat of the glacier is “potentially a contributing factor” to the bedrock collapse and subsequent disaster.
This is because the removal of the glacier from the lower slopes leaves the “upper rock slopes less stable”, she says.
The most recent assessment by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development said that glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region are “rapidly shrinking” as a result of climate change. (This region extends 3,500km over Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan.)
It said this loss is threatening the safety of the nearly two billion people, including by increasing the risk of “glacial lake outburst floods” (GLOFs). A GLOF is a sudden and catastrophic release of meltwater from a glacial lake.
Although this disaster was not caused by a GLOF, it is known that climate change is making such events more likely.
Can the event be attributed to climate change?
In the wake of the flash floods, climate campaigners, media outlets and Nepalese politicians have linked them to human-caused climate change.
However, many climate scientists have cautioned that it is too early to say precisely how climate change impacted the disaster.
Davies tells Carbon Brief:
“These events happen so quickly that the exact causes and drivers can take a little time to uncover, especially if the event was a surprise and there had been no monitoring system in place.”
When trying to determine the role human-caused climate change played in the intensity or likelihood of extreme weather, scientists turn to the field of “attribution science”.
To date, no formal rapid attribution study has been produced that attempts to quantify whether – and how – climate change contributed to the event.
Scientists have noted that climate attribution of ice-rock avalanches – which are typically driven by a variety of factors – remains limited, in part because of the lack of a long-term observational record of previous collapses in high mountain areas.
Meanwhile, the studies that do exist stop short of directly linking such disasters to climate change. For example, the authors of a 2021 study into the Chamoli ice-rock avalanche concluded that “we cannot attribute this individual disaster specifically to climate change”.
However, they added, the “possibly increasing frequency of high-mountain slope instabilities can likely be related to observed atmospheric warming and corresponding long-term changes in cryospheric conditions (glaciers and permafrost)”.
In the aftermath of the disaster, many researchers have similarly highlighted that climate change could not be singled out as the cause of the disaster, even if warming likely increased the probability of its occurrence.
On the Climate Brink substack, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor Dr Zeke Hausfather noted that a “definitive single-event attribution” of the more recent disaster “may never be possible” due to the “messy causality of rock-ice avalanches”.
However, he added that both the existing scientific literature and “essentially every scientist working on these hazards point in the same direction” – namely, that warming is making such events more likely in the Himalaya.
Steiner tells Carbon Brief it might be possible to attribute different factors that played a role in the disasters to climate change – for instance, the recession of the glacier – but it would be more difficult to do so for the event as a whole.
Part of the reason for this, he says, is that rock failures in this region of the Himalaya have occurred for millennia, well before humans started altering the climate.
However, he continues:
“The physics of it is not something that has been made possible by climate change. This could have happened without it. But the chance of it happening – and the likelihood of it happening five years after a previous, similar event [in Chamoli] – we, as the scientific community, can be pretty confident about that [being increased because of a changing climate].
“This is because so many of the changes that we know are related to climate change can potentially drive the build-up to eventual failure.”
Ultimately, says Davies, a “careful attribution study is needed, but it is hard to argue that the rapidly warming climate is not having an effect in these regions”. She adds:
“A single event may have multiple drivers, but we are seeing an increase in these events and are likely to see more as the permafrost and glacier melt continues.”
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The post Q&A: What can – and cannot – be said about global warming’s role in the 2026 Himalayan floods appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: What can – and cannot – be said about global warming’s role in the 2026 Himalayan floods
The UK has avoided the need for gas imports worth £5.9bn since the start of the Hormuz crisis as a result of record electricity generation from wind and solar, reveals Carbon Brief analysis.
While gas prices are surging towards levels not seen since the 2022 energy crisis, the UK has been generating record amounts of power from wind and solar, up 14% year-on-year.
This unprecedented clean-power generation is directly cutting the need for gas-fired electricity, which is down by nearly 10% year-on-year in 2026 to date.
In total, wind and solar have generated a record 41% share of the UK’s electricity needs in 2026 to date, compared with 25% from gas, according to Carbon Brief’s analysis.
The figure below shows that wind and solar generation has avoided the need for UK gas imports worth a total of £5.9bn since the outbreak of war between the US and Iran in February 2026.
The analysis shows that these avoided gas imports would have required the UK to secure the equivalent of more than 100 additional tanker deliveries of liquefied natural gas (LNG).
The £1.3bn import saving in September 2026 to date is the result of record wind and solar output, at nearly 10 terawatt hours (TWh), combined with surging gas prices.
Wholesale gas prices in the UK have remained elevated ever since Russia cut off supplies to Europe in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Gas averaged 90p per therm from 2023 until the start of this year, roughly three times above 2019 prices, before the Covid and Ukraine crises.
Since the outbreak of war in the Middle East in March, gas prices have climbed higher still, averaging 134p per therm or nearly four times the level seen in 2019.
In September 2026 to date, gas prices have averaged 189p per therm, reaching their highest level since the global energy crisis in 2022, as shown in the figure below.
UK gas prices are spiking again because winter is approaching – meaning higher demand for heating – and there is no end in sight for the Hormuz crisis.
At the same time, European gas stocks are low. This means Europe will have to compete with Asia to secure the cargoes of LNG needed to keep warm.
In the UK, high wholesale gas prices are hitting household gas bills under the price cap set by energy regulator Ofgem – but thanks to clean energy, electricity bills have barely increased.
From this Thursday, 1 October, typical household gas bills will be 33% higher than they were in April, some £200 per year, according to thinktank Nesta.
In contrast, household electricity bills will only have risen 4%, according to Nesta’s analysis.
Andrew Sissons, director for sustainable future at Nesta, explained in a social media post that “the link between electricity and gas prices has already begun to break”.
The UK and other fossil-fuel importing nations are being hit not only by high gas prices, but also by high prices for oil, diesel and other refined fuels. The EU has reportedly had to pay an extra €100bn for fossil-fuel imports since the start of the crisis.
For example, UK diesel prices this week hit record levels of nearly £2 per litre. In contrast, recent Carbon Brief analysis shows that electric cars are up to nine times cheaper to drive.
In her speech to the Labour party conference this week, energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh said that energy bills were high because the UK is “exposed to global fossil-fuel markets”.
In his own conference speech, prime minister Andy Burnham said the expansion of clean energy was easing the impact of high gas prices on electricity bills. He said:
“We are already taking more control of our electricity prices with a massive expansion of home-grown renewables and nuclear. I have asked Miatta to speed up the breaking of the link between what we pay for power at home and the international gas market, to get bills down.”
The post Analysis: Wind and solar save UK from gas imports worth £5.9bn during Hormuz crisis appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Wind and solar save UK from gas imports worth £5.9bn during Hormuz crisis
The deadly flash flood that thundered down Nepal’s Bhote Koshi valley a month ago may have been hard to predict given the complexity of monitoring glacial slopes in the high mountains. But it should come as a surprise to no one that such a disaster could happen in a world set to barrel past the 1.5C warming limit governments agreed to in 2015.
I say this with confidence because even before the ink was dry on the Paris Agreement, former colleagues and I were writing extensively about the dangers posed by accelerating glacier melt in the Himalayas. I went back to look at what we covered, often working with local journalists in Pakistan, India and Nepal. It was substantial.
Comment: The response to Nepal’s disaster is a test for global climate institutions
In one story from a conference on climate change and geology, Bill McGuire, a professor who then led the Benfield Hazard Research Centre at University College London, was quoted as saying: “The most likely thing we are going to see soon is an increased level in giant landslides in mountainous terrains, huge collapses, millions of cubic metres of rock.”
That is precisely what unleashed Nepal’s most recent disaster, some 13 years later.
Other articles zoomed in on internationally funded programmes to prevent glacial lake outburst floods; studies warning of the rising risks to downstream communities; and cross-border efforts (or lack of them) to set up monitoring systems. But information has not led to sufficient action.
Falling behind growing impacts
Reporting on climate-related disasters over the past 20 years (it was way back then that UN aid chief John Holmes started referring to extreme weather as the “new normal”) has been a pretty frustrating beat, as things have gotten dramatically worse.
There’s no question that our understanding of the risks has grown hugely – alongside our knowledge of how to protect people and infrastructure in the face of fast-growing threats.
Yet governments and businesses have dragged their feet on adaptation policies and practical measures, even when confronted with the numbers showing it’s far cheaper to prevent and prepare than to clean up and rebuild after a flood or a storm. This intransigence has left a yawning chasm in the world’s ability to deal with climate change-driven impacts.
Let’s call it the adaptation accountability gap.
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These days we see the effects all around us – in hospital emergency rooms where workers and older people struggle with heat exhaustion; in campsites and hotels abandoned by holidaymakers fleeing forest fires; in flooded streets piled high with mud, broken furniture and twisted cars.
The only bright side to the growing climate chaos we’re experiencing is that it’s become practically impossible for politicians and corporate bosses to ignore the evidence – and the rising cost to their balance sheets. Voters who can no longer afford to shoulder the economic and social burden of this damage need to let their leaders know time’s up.
1.5C overshoot means adapting differently
Last week, during Climate Week NYC, I moderated an event packed with experts who work on adapting to climate change – from Nepal to Brazil, from Sierra Leone to the Marshall Islands, and from communities to the top of governments and UN agencies. They spoke of tree-planting to stabilise slopes, heat insurance for informal workers, a climate risk guide for midwives, drought-resistant seeds and solar panels to irrigate farmland along the Nile.
Amid the diversity of experiences and approaches, there were two common threads: first, as underlined by the UN Environment Programme’s new report on overshooting 1.5C, we may have missed the boat to catch up on adaptation as we know it.
With global warming continuing apace, we’ll need to come up with new “transformational” strategies if the coral reefs, ice sheets, oceans and other natural systems on which we rely cross tipping points and unleash cascading consequences. Nepal’s flash flood is being flagged as an example of the kind of disaster that requires a major change in how we think about adaptation.
Second, the investment required to adapt to intensifying climate shocks and stresses can no longer be seen as something to be squeezed out of shrinking foreign aid budgets. There are a growing number of tried-and-tested funds and mechanisms for channelling finance at the local, national and global levels – these must be filled, replenished and used without delay.
Businesses need to get stuck in too, not least to safeguard their assets, operations and profits – but also because in some sectors like agriculture or water there are opportunities for a return. Despite this, there are many activities governments will have no choice but to pay for, such as moving people out of the path of rising seas.
Finance not flowing where needed
Mikko Ollikainen, who heads up the UN’s pioneering Adaptation Fund for developing countries, told the event the fund has a portfolio of projects worth $1.6 billion but a pipeline waiting to be financed to the tune of $1.8 billion. Yet, in recent years, as needs balloon, donor nations have failed to meet its annual fundraising target of $300 million at COP climate summits.
The chair of the UN climate body for implementation, Julia Gardiner, said she expects to see more pressure on governments at November’s COP31 summit in Türkiye to show how they will meet a goal to triple adaptation finance by 2035 and fill the under-resourced coffers of the fledgling Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD).
Nepal, meanwhile, is still waiting for a formal response to its request to the FRLD for urgent support to tackle the aftermath of the flood. Manjeet Dhakal, a Nepali scientist who advises least-developed countries in the UN climate process, said the disaster – which killed over 1,450 people and left nearly 6,000 missing – cannot be treated as just the latest climate crisis that grabs the headlines before it’s replaced by another.
That was backed up by Prakriti Dhakal, personal under-secretary to Nepal’s prime minister, who has been working closely on the emergency response. She said she had received many condolences and warm words of support during her meetings in New York.
But, she asked, “when you go home, will you continue having that sympathy for us that translates into something rational, something long-term, to strengthen the communities in Nepal?” A fitting response would be for governments to get behind a new Himalayan Climate Resilience Mechanism, proposed by Nepal’s leader at the UN last week, as one way to start closing the adaptation accountability gap.
The post Nepal’s disaster has laid bare the world’s adaptation accountability gap appeared first on Climate Home News.
Nepal’s disaster has laid bare the world’s adaptation accountability gap
Brazil’s environment minister says he is “very optimistic” that the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) – a new rainforest fund to channel private and public finance to developing nations – can meet a key $10 billion funding target this year, and is not at risk from his country’s elections next month.
The TFFF, launched by Brazil at COP30 in the Amazon last November and co-led by Norway, is intended as an alternative to traditional grant-based forest finance. The fund aims to raise $125bn in public and private capital, invest it in bond markets, and then pay countries that keep their forests standing from the annual returns. Donor contributions needed to get it going have tailed off after an initial burst.
Speaking to Climate Home News on the sidelines of Climate Week in New York, Brazilian environment minister João Paulo Capobianco pointed out that in less than a year since its official launch, the TFFF has already secured $7.3bn from governments.
“How many other initiatives can say that?” he asked. “Of course, if you have $7 billion, it’s easier for more countries to consider their own contribution. And not just countries – non-governmental organisations also. We are expecting even more support.”
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As its initial target, the TFFF aims to raise $10bn in seed capital from governments by the end of 2026, and still needs to fill a gap of $2.7bn. Its backers say that for each dollar in public funding, they can secure $4 from the private sector. Critics say the $10bn goal barely covers the fund’s expenses and would not allow it to make any significant payments to forest countries.
Because setting up its financial architecture, raising the starting capital and making the first investments will take time, experts say the TFFF is unlikely to generate any payments for developing countries before 2028.
Seeking new pledges
Capobianco told Climate Home News that Brazil is still in talks with potential new contributors to the fund, among them China, Korea and Japan, and said he hoped to see more pledges announced at the upcoming biodiversity and climate COPs in October and November. The Netherlands is expected to up its first small contribution and Canada may also come in, according to other sources close to the TFFF.
Because the fund was not created as part of the UN climate talks and is hosted by the World Bank, developing countries can contribute without taking on wider donor responsibilities for climate finance. Brazil and Indonesia – both large emerging rainforest nations – have each pledged $1bn to the TFFF.
Earlier in September, the UK became the latest country to pledge funding – promising a loan of £400 million (about $540 million). Capobianco welcomed the contribution and noted that Britain has also said it will keep “under review” the possibility of putting in more.
Currently the largest donor is Norway, which announced a $3bn pledge last year at COP30 in Belém. However, that pledge came with conditions, among them that the fund must reach $10bn in sponsor capital by 2026, and that Norway’s contribution can’t make up more than 20% of that total. Over the longer term, this means the fund must raise $15bn from governments to unlock Norway’s full investment.
Comment: UK’s budget juggling trick with rainforest loan for bus-fare cap needs transparency
Speaking at a forest finance event in New York, Norway’s environment minister Sigrun Aasland said the country’s pledge was made not “only out of solidarity but because of shared interests”, adding that protecting rainforests is critical for climate and biodiversity goals as well as for national security.
“Tropical deforestation matters to people in the Amazon and in the Congo. But let’s not forget that it also matters to global food production and to the cost of living in Oslo or in London,” she said.
At the event, Guyana’s minister of natural resources Vickram Bharrat said the TFFF is “one in a menu of options” to finance forest protection in developing countries. He added that to boost its capital “maybe we should put some amount of pressure on oil companies to contribute to the fund”.
Upcoming election “not a risk”
Brazil, which has been pivotal to getting the fund off the ground, is now heading into a national election that could see the country swing back to an anti-climate stance if right-wing candidate Flávio Bolsonaro beats current left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Capobianco, however, said the election result does not pose a risk to the TFFF.
“It’s a global initiative, not a Brazilian initiative. We proposed the first idea, but nowadays it’s a global initiative,” he said. “We believe the investor countries and the tropical countries together have the possibility to continue this process.”
In Brazil, the first round of voting is scheduled for Sunday, October 4. If no candidate wins more than 50% of valid votes, a run-off ballot will take place on October 25.
COP30 roadmap to end deforestation will invite countries to draft domestic plans
In July, the TFFF board adopted a charter, which outlines the instrument’s objectives and values, including that 20% of the payments made to tropical countries will go directly to Indigenous people and local communities.
The charter also says the TFFF board may comprise up to 12 member countries during the initial phase. Currently, seven seats are filled by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Germany, Brazil, France, the Netherlands, Norway and Indonesia.
The board has also formally incorporated the Tropical Forest Investment Fund (TFIF) – the TFFF’s investment arm that will trade bonds in financial markets – hosted in Luxembourg.
The post Brazil confident new rainforest fund will reach $10bn donor milestone appeared first on Climate Home News.
Brazil confident new rainforest fund will reach $10bn donor milestone
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