The United Kingdom will not make an initial contribution to Brazil’s Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF), a $125 billion endowment-style fund designed to compensate tropical forest nations and local communities for preserving their forests, in what is a high-profile setback to Brazil as world leaders gather in Belém for the COP30 leaders’ summit from later today. It comes as the UK revealed its COP30 priorities during written statements in the House of Commons yesterday.
The TFFF, which Brazil will formally launch at the leaders’ summit over the coming days, is intended to combine public, philanthropic, and private capital into an endowment-style structure that pays annual stipends to tropical forest nations based on the area of forest they maintain rather than buying carbon offsets. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has urged developed countries to contribute roughly $25 billion in public and philanthropic capital, which diplomats say would unlock an additional $100 billion in private investment. Brazil will make the inaugural pledge and has been pressing its partners to follow suit.
The UK’s decision is a blow to the host country and its partners.
“The Brazilians are fuming,” a diplomatic source told the UK-based Guardian overnight. Downing Street told ministers the fund is at an early stage and that there are outstanding questions about how the mechanism will operate in practice. The UK has provided funding to help build the institutional structure underpinning the facility, but has not committed to the fund itself. Officials have said they may consider a future contribution once governance, disbursement rules, and measurement mechanisms are clarified.
Meanwhile, Zac Goldsmith, the Conservative peer who led UK deforestation work at COP26, criticised the Starmer government’s stance. “The UK helped design the fund, having catapulted forests to the top of the agenda when we hosted COP. But this government seems only interested in one-dimensional carbon accounting and has just walked away,” he said. Goldsmith described the TFFF as “the best way to preserve threatened forests worldwide” and said the structure “doesn’t require grants or aid. It is a fund, with the first tranche provided as an investment by governments, and the remainder — the vast majority — by the private sector. The fund will last in perpetuity and will provide returns to investors as well as annual income to those forest countries that protect their forests.”
Conservation groups are now urging the UK to reconsider its stance.
“Failing to invest in the TFFF at this stage is a missed opportunity for the UK government. The TFFF is an innovative new finance mechanism that will quadruple the amount of money available to keep the world’s forests standing and ultimately underpin our food security at a time when rising food prices are hitting UK shoppers,” said Tanya Steele, chief executive of WWF-UK. Zoe Quiroz Cullen, director of climate and nature linkages at Fauna & Flora, said that “helping Brazil to shape the TFFF but then leaving others to front the initial cash at its launch is an abandonment of leadership by the UK government, while others, including the global south, step up. The irony and injustice in this should not be lost. We need all of the tools we can get to tackle the dual climate and nature loss crises, and the TFFF offers an additional way of channelling finance to protecting the lungs of our planet, while promising a financial return on investment.”
Diplomats said Norway appears likely to maintain its commitment, while Germany’s position was described as uncertain. Other potential backers, including China, France, Singapore, and the UAE, have been weighing their announcements. Brazil has argued that the TFFF could help break long-standing deadlocks over burden-sharing in global climate finance by delivering predictable, multi-year funding calibrated to conservation performance rather than offset market prices; Ambassador André Corrêa do Lago has urged world leaders to back the TFFF through “enhanced global support and investment via financial resources, technology transfer and capacity-building” and has written that “Forests can buy us time in climate action in our rapidly closing window of opportunity.”
Last month, Wood Central announced that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva launched the new fund at the United Nations in New York in collaboration with the TFFF. The initiative 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. Rather than buying carbon offsets, it rewards conservation “in real time.” According to estimates circulated among diplomats, 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 said 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 made clear their own pledges depend on Brazil demonstrating its commitment—“putting its money where its mouth is,” as one envoy put it.
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. Diplomatic insiders believe Brazil’s announcement could 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 aims to change 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.
