The Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) is set to be launched at the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30), being held in Belém, Brazil, over November 10–21.
The TFFF is being promoted as a “once-in-a-generation” initiative for tropical forest conservation and climate action, by aiming to raise billions of dollars each year to halt deforestation. Governments, banks and corporate conservation NGOs — including the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace — have welcomed the scheme.
However, the TFFF is not a real solution to the climate crisis nor deforestation. It is “green” capitalism’s latest colonial scheme, designed to guarantee profits for corporations and governments in the Global North by deepening debt and financial dependency in the Global South. Meanwhile, the amount of money provided for forest protection — and the communities that defend them — would be marginal, if any.
A new report released last month by the World Rainforest Movement (WRM), Tropical Forest Forever Facility: A new trap for peoples and forests in the Global South, describes the TFFF as “a mechanism steeped in colonial rationale”.
The TFFF is financed by the Tropical Forest Investment Fund (TFIF), which would initially raise money largely from loans from rich “sponsor” countries — like Norway, Germany and France — and institutions, such as “philanthropic” organisations.
The TFIF would then buy bonds — essentially a loan at a fixed interest rate over a specified time — from other governments and corporations, using the returns to repay the original investors before the remaining profits are distributed by the TFFF.
The TFIF will be operated by the World Bank, which played a key role in proposing and developing the TFIF and TFFF. The United-States-dominated institution has, among many crimes, a 60-year record of underwriting global deforestation.
Although the TFFF is marketed as a proposal from the Global South, it was concocted in 2009, under a different name, by former World Bank treasurer Kenneth Lay. Lay, now deceased, was also the millionaire CEO and chairman of US energy company Enron, which was responsible for massive corporate fraud.
Led by the Global South?
While some Global South governments are represented in the TFFF’s steering committee, the TFIF’s board members are appointed by the governments of sponsor countries. As the TFIF is focused on maximising profits, it will most likely be stacked with corporate financial managers, answerable only to sponsor countries, not the TFFF’s steering committee.
As the WRM report notes, “the governments of the countries with tropical forests have no say in this decision, even though TFFF is marketed as a ‘proposal from the Global South’”.
In practice, this means that the same governments and representatives of banks and institutions historically responsible for financing logging, mining, industrial agriculture and fossil fuel expansion would oversee how “forest protection” funds are raised.
Third World Network’s (TWN) analysis of the TFIF reveals the core logic of the scheme, which is not financed by rich countries transferring funds to poorer countries.
Instead, the TFIF raises capital by borrowing on global financial markets. There are no safeguards on the sources of investment, so they will most likely come from bond-heavy industries like mining, agribusiness and energy. Ironically, the TFIF would be funded with profits partly derived from the destruction of tropical forests.
That borrowed capital is then lent in the form of bonds — with higher interest — to governments or companies in tropical forest countries. These countries are therefore expected to repay the loans that supposedly fund the “rewards” they receive for forest protection.
As the TWN explains, the money used for forest conservation is generated by poor countries’ “debt servicing and payments to international investors and in this case, the TFIF”.
“The real money in this sense will therefore come from developing countries themselves, disguised by the international capital markets as ‘natural’ return on investments,” the TWN report reads. “In other words, much of the funding is not a transfer from rich to poor countries, but rather value extraction from poor countries’ own high borrowing costs.”
Essentially, the entire scheme is designed to guarantee returns for Global North sponsor governments and corporate investors through transferring wealth from poor to rich countries.
The TFIF exploits and exacerbates the illegitimate debt burden — rooted in slavery and colonialism — of Global South economies. Many post-colonial countries inherited crushing debts, which were maintained and expanded though the imposition of International Monetary Fund and World Bank structural adjustment programs.
“TFIF wants to exploit this high indebtedness of countries across the Global South, or from companies that need money to expand their largescale, destructive operations,” the WRM report reads. “In short, the TFIF is part of a global financial market, with the TFFF as an add-on that might pay out some money for forest conservation by distributing leftover profits from investing in bond markets — but only if there are any leftover profits.”
The leftovers
If there is any money left over after the rich commercial investors, sponsor governments and World Bank-appointed TFIF financial managers, advisers, contractors and various middlemen take their cut, then tropical forest governments would receive US$4 per hectare of standing forest.
To be eligible to qualify for potential payments from the TFFF, governments must pass a “forest monitoring test”, based on deforestation satellite data. The test itself is fraught with problems, with independent researcher Larry Lohmann arguing that it is “designed to make sure that TFCs [tropical forest countries] flunk much of the time, keeping the promised forest payments out of reach”.
While part of the TFFF mandates that governments must allocate at least 20% of the money they receive to Indigenous peoples and local communities, it is at the discretion of the recipient government as to how it is allocated. As the WRM report points out, this reduces the likelihood that money will reach these territories, especially under governments that do not even recognise the existence of Indigenous peoples.
The TFFF’s annual payouts, which are not even guaranteed, are also based on the assumption that they are sufficient to compete with the highly profitable industries predicated on deforestation. According to NGO Global Canopy, the “deforestation economy” was worth US$8.9 trillion of investment from 150 financial institutions last year — 2000 times the TFFF’s proposed US$4 billion for forest protection.
The WRM report draws similarities between the TFFF and the Word Bank-sponsored Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) scheme, first introduced in 2005 as a carbon trading market to supposedly protect standing forests. Apart from driving land grabs, evictions and countless other human rights abuses in the name of “conservation”, the top-down neo-colonial REDD scheme failed to reduce deforestation, and even played a role in increasing it.
“One of the lessons learned from 20 years of REDD is that, for businesses that profit from large-scale deforestation, the revenues from carbon credit sales are just not as attractive as the profits they can make from forest destruction,” the report reads.
In fact, as the WRM report points out, there is even less of an incentive for private companies under the TFFF than under REDD, as the payments do not go to them directly, but to governments of countries with tropical forests.
‘A gross delusion’
A Fundación Solón and Global Forest Coalition report released in March, TFFF: A false solution for tropical forests, argues that “it is a gross delusion to believe that allocating a payment per hectare will solve these structural problems of capitalism, which are primarily driven by private capital and companies”.
“For green capitalism, the climate crisis is not a product of the voracious logic of profit accumulation, but rather the failure of the capitalist market to assign a monetary value to environmental services and hence attract capital investment.”
However, even from a purely monetaristic perspective of conservation, the TFFF is unlikely to make any meaningful contributions to protecting the world’s tropical forests. Instead, it provides a green cover for extractive industries to continue business as usual.
It is a distraction from rich countries refusing to pay the “climate debt” owed to Global South countries, as well as wiping the debts — which accounted for 39% of government spending in “low-income” countries in 2023 — imposed by colonialism and predatory neoliberal institutions.
Measures like taxing fossil fuel companies and billionaires, redistributing 20% of public military spending and cancelling debt payments in low-income countries would raise US$5.3 trillion each year in climate financing, according to an Oil Change International analysis released in September last year.
There are massive amounts of wealth that could fund the land rights and territorial autonomy of Indigenous peoples, who are at the frontlines of resisting and dismantling a system predicated on environmental and human exploitation.
[Organisations can sign on to a statement opposing the Tropical Forest Forever Facility here.]