Weeks before the world’s leaders gather in Belém for COP 30, Brazil will become the first country to inject capital into the Tropical Forests Forever Facility, a brainchild of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which could unlock a $125 billion in climate financing megafund to protect and conserve the world’s tropical forests.
Wood Central understands the new fund, dubbed the TFFF, combines public, philanthropic and private-sector capital into an endowment-style structure that pays annual stipends to tropical forest nations based on the area of forest they maintain. And rather than buying carbon offsets, the fund rewards conservation ‘in real time’. According to new estimates, Brazil and its core partners must generate about $25 billion in public and philanthropic funding to unlock an additional $100 billion in private investment.
Sources close to the Finance Ministry say Brazil’s internal deliberations concluded weeks ago, after President Lula and Finance Minister Fernando Haddad negotiated figures behind closed doors. While exact numbers and disbursement schedules remain under wraps until the formal announcement, diplomats in recent discussions have made clear their own pledges depend on Brazil demonstrating its commitment—”putting its money where its mouth is,” as one envoy put it.
China has already indicated it will join the donor group.
In July, China’s Finance Minister Lan Foan privately informed Maddad that Beijing planned to contribute, although both sides agreed to keep the amount confidential. Other backers include the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Norway, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, each weighing its own announcement.
“Forests can buy us time in climate action in our rapidly closing window of opportunity,” Ambassador André Corrêa do Lago, COP30 president-designate, wrote in an open letter in March, who at the time, urged world leaders to back the TFFF through “enhanced global support and investment via financial resources, technology transfer and capacity-building” to safeguard the Amazon and other critical biomes as the planet’s most powerful carbon sinks.
As the host of COP30, Brazil aims to highlight its “United for Our Forests” initiative—a follow-up to last year’s Amazon Summit—focusing delegates on halting and reversing deforestation by 2030, as called for in the first global stocktake under the Paris Agreement. “By reversing deforestation and recovering what has been lost, we can unlock massive greenhouse-gas removals while bringing ecosystems back to life,” Ambassador Corrêa do Lago added, highlighting that the TFFF’s payments are calculated per hectare of standing forest.
Wood Central previously reported that President Lula first unveiled the forest-finance “megafund” at Dubai’s COP28, initially pitching a $250 billion plan to support 12 tropical forest nations across Latin America, the Congo Basin and Southeast Asia. Unlike carbon-offset markets that price credits, the megafund promises predictable, multi-year funding calibrated to each country’s conservation progress and unique needs. Now, diplomatic insiders believe Brazil’s announcement will break a long-standing impasse in global climate finance over burden sharing. With wealthy countries under pressure to deliver and emerging economies demanding equitable mechanisms, the TFFF could rewrite the rules on how the world pays to protect its most precious ecosystems.
- To learn more about COP 30 and its agenda, click here for Wood Central’s special feature, and click here to download the First Letter from the President of COP30, Ambassador André Corrêa do Lago.
