16th December, 2024
Mongabay
Mike DiGirolamo
In 2023, at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, the Brazilian government proposed a new funding mechanism to help tropical nations keep their forests standing. They called it the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), and its incentive is relatively simple: using satellite monitoring in participating nations to determine which ones have preserved their forests, and rewarding them based on that data.
Fast-forward to the COP16 biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia, in 2024. Mongabay contributor Justin Catanoso attended the conference and covered the new fund, which functions not as a donation mechanism or loan but rather as an investment portfolio. The money is “not going to a country as a loan that they have to repay. The investors get paid back first, and the money that is generated by the investments above what the investors get is what will be given to the tropical countries,” he says.
Listen to the podcast here.


