African climate justice groups at the ongoing COP30 in Belém, Brazil, have rejected the newly launched $125 billion Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), warning that the initiative poses grave risks to the continent’s forests, communities, and sovereignty.
The Africa Make Big Polluters Pay (MBPP) Coalition, a bloc of more than 32 organisations including CAPPA, Gender CC Southern Africa, and the Global Forest Coalition, said the fund, marketed as an innovative climate finance mechanism, is instead a pathway for powerful financial institutions to consolidate control over tropical forests under the guise of protection.
Launched by Brazil and designed as a blended-finance instrument promising annual payments to countries for standing forests, the TFFF has been promoted as a breakthrough in global climate funding. But the African bloc insists this excitement is misplaced, arguing that the model reduces forests to tradable assets while advancing private investor interests ahead of vulnerable communities.
“The facility commodifies living ecosystems and undermines Indigenous and community-led stewardship. It erodes the very principles of climate justice it claims to uphold,” the coalition said on Monday.
According to the group, African countries, including Nigeria, Angola, Ghana, Liberia, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Uganda, are being drawn into a system that entrenches financial dependence and weakens local control over forest resources. The TFFF proposes payments of about $4 per hectare of forest annually, an amount the coalition described as tokenistic and disconnected from the ecological and cultural value of tropical forests.
The coalition’s strongest concern centres on what it calls corporate capture, a structure in which investor returns are prioritised before any finance reaches participating countries. It warned that payments to nations, depend on the performance of the facility’s investment portfolio, effectively placing climate finance at the mercy of markets and speculation.
“This is a profit-making instrument disguised as climate action,” the group said, adding that even one percent of global military spending would provide six times the TFFF’s anticipated annual disbursement without exposing countries to financial risks.
The appointment of the World Bank as trustee of the fund further deepened opposition.
Akinbode Oluwafemi, executive director of CAPPA, said World Bank–led climate financing historically centralises power, delays funding, and silences frontline communities.
Representatives from Gender CC Southern Africa and the Global Forest Coalition also raised concerns that Indigenous knowledge and women’s roles in forest preservation would be sidelined in favour of corporate priorities.
The coalition urged world leaders at COP30 to reject the TFFF and instead channel support toward transparent, community-led climate finance models that strengthen, rather than undermine, local stewardship and environmental justice.
