BELEM, BRAZIL — The newly launched Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), a flagship $125 billion blended-finance fund spearheaded by Brazil at the ongoing COP 30 climate conference, has been met with fierce opposition from the Africa Make Big Polluters Pay (MBPP) Coalition. In a strongly worded statement on Monday, the coalition—representing over 32 African organisations—rejected the initiative, labelling it a “dangerous and misleading attempt to financialise nature” that fails to deliver genuine climate support to vulnerable nations.
The TFFF is designed to provide annual, results-based payments to countries for protecting their standing tropical forests, a mechanism widely marketed as an innovative solution for climate finance. However, the Africa MBPP Coalition argues that the fund’s model fundamentally reduces critical ecosystems to “tradable assets” under the control of powerful financial institutions, risking the perpetuation of the very extractive systems that fuel deforestation and inequality. For the coalition, which includes prominent groups like Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA) and Gender CC Southern Africa, the excitement surrounding the TFFF is “misplaced” as it commodifies living ecosystems and undermines community-led stewardship.
The coalition’s primary concern centres on the TFFF’s financing structure, which they criticise for operating more like a financial vehicle designed for market-based returns than a climate-response mechanism. The fund’s model prioritises investor returns before any payments reach forest-holding nations, meaning disbursements are tied to the performance of an investment portfolio. This system, the Africa MBPP warned, risks deepening corporate influence and marginalising frontline communities whose traditional knowledge is vital for biodiversity protection, particularly across countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, and Uganda, which are being drawn into the scheme. The proposed annual payment of roughly US$4 per hectare of standing forest was dismissed as “tokenistic” when weighed against the true ecological and cultural value of the forests.
Furthermore, the African coalition condemned the decision to appoint the World Bank as the TFFF’s trustee, describing it as a “regressive and exclusionary arrangement” that strips away local ownership and accountability. Akinbode Oluwafemi, Executive Director of CAPPA, asserted that “Accountability in climate finance starts with rejecting corporate capture,” adding that the World Bank must not be permitted to turn forest protection into another business model. Mokoena Ndivile from Gender CC Southern Africa and Kwami Kpondzo of the Global Forest Coalition echoed this sentiment, arguing that World Bank involvement centralises power and risks prioritising corporate profit over the needs of indigenous peoples and local communities.
The MBPP Coalition drew a stark financial comparison to expose the TFFF’s priorities: redirecting just 1 per cent of the global annual military budget—approximately $27 billion—would yield over six times the amount the TFFF’s “risky, market-based model” promises. The group concluded that this comparison “exposes the TFFF for what it truly is: a profit-making instrument disguised as climate action,” urging world leaders to reject the facility and instead support transparent, community-led climate finance systems that bolster, rather than undermine, environmental justice and local control.
