Brazil’s new multi-billion dollar fund for forest conservation, launched at COP30, is far short of its initial fundraising target, but should still be operational within the next 12 months, its top official told Semafor.
Garo Batmanian, director-general of the Brazilian Forestry Service and coordinator of the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, said that past attempts to raise international donations for forest conservation have been held back because they predicated payouts for developing countries to the amount of carbon emissions they avoided by not cutting down trees. This creates a perverse incentive, he said, whereby reducing the rate of deforestation leads to lower payments. “We are turning the issue on its head,” he said, by linking payments more directly to hectares of standing forest.
The new fund will raise capital from governments and private financial institutions, invest it in bonds, and use the proceeds to pay forested countries that meet certain conservation criteria. So far the fund has raised a little over $5 billion, of an initial goal of $25 billion, from government donors, which Batmanian said can be leveraged for an additional $100 billion from private sources. But by the time of COP31, he is confident the fund will have enough to make its first investments.
Some environmental groups are skeptical, warning that the fund could sap contributions to existing pools of climate finance and that it’s structured in such a way that it will need to pay back its private-sector investors before its intended recipients.