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From Idu Jude, Abuja
The Africa Make Big Polluters Pay (MBPP) coalition, at the ongoing COP 30 in Brazil, has strongly rejected the newly launched $125 billion Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), warning that it dangerously financialises nature under the guise of protecting forests.
The TFFF, spearheaded by Brazil, promises annual payments to countries for safeguarding tropical forests through a blended-finance model.
But in a statement on Monday, the Africa MBPP, which brings together more than 32 organizations including Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA), Gender CC Southern Africa, and the Global Forest Coalition (GFC), argued that the fund provides no real support for climate-vulnerable nations.
The coalition said the excitement surrounding the TFFF is misplaced. Rather than protecting forests, it commodifies living ecosystems, undermines Indigenous and community-led stewardship, and erodes the principles of climate justice it claims to uphold.
The group warned that the fund reduces tropical forests to tradable assets controlled by powerful financial institutions, perpetuating the same extractive systems that drive deforestation, exploitation, and inequality. Countries including Nigeria, Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Ghana, Liberia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Togo, and Uganda are at risk of being drawn into a system that prioritizes investor returns over community needs.
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“What it offers is not real climate finance, but new layers of external bureaucracy and financial engineering,” the coalition said. The fund proposes just four dollars per hectare annually for standing forests, an amount the group describes as tokenistic compared to the ecological, cultural, and economic value of tropical forests and the real costs of community-led protection.
The coalition also criticized the appointment of the World Bank as trustee, calling it regressive and exclusionary, likely to marginalize local communities and centralize power.
“Accountability in climate finance starts with rejecting corporate capture,” said Akinbode Oluwafemi, Executive Director of CAPPA. “The World Bank must not be allowed to turn forest protection into another business model.”
Mokoena Ndivile of Gender CC Southern Africa added, “Forest preservation is not a privilege; it is a right tied to the survival, dignity, and livelihoods of communities, especially women. Handing control of the TFFF to the World Bank risks turning this right into another instrument of financial control, and we will not accept that.”
The coalition concluded that true climate action will not come from financial schemes or distant institutions, but from the communities that have always protected the forests. They urged world leaders to reject the TFFF and instead support transparent, community-led climate finance that strengthens local control and environmental justice.
