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Tropical Forest Facility: A Profit-Making Instrument Disguised as Climate Action
By prince Benson Davies
The Africa Make Big Polluters Pay (MBPP) Coalition has strongly rejected the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), a $125 billion blended-finance fund aimed at protecting and maintaining tropical forests. The coalition, comprising over 32 member organisations, argues that the facility commodifies nature, undermines Indigenous and community-led stewardship, and erodes climate justice principles. They warn that the facility’s model, which prioritises investor returns over community needs, poses grave risks to Africa’s biodiversity and climate-vulnerable communities. The coalition is urging world leaders to reject the facility and instead support transparent, community-led climate finance systems that strengthen local control and environmental justice.
But in a statement on Monday, the Africa MBPP said the facility – widely marketed as an innovative climate finance instrument – offers no real support to climate-vulnerable nations.
The Africa MBPP, comprising over 32 member organisations including Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA), Gender CC Southern Africa, Global Forest Coalition (GFC), and others from across the continent, is committed to holding polluting corporations accountable for their significant contributions to the climate crisis.
The coalition warned that TFFF reduces tropical forests to “tradable assets” controlled by powerful financial institutions, who will in turn perpetuate the same extractive systems that drive deforestation, exploitation, and inequality.
“The excitement that has trailed the launch of the TFFF is misplaced,” the coalition said. “Rather than safeguarding forests, it commodifies living ecosystems, undermines Indigenous and community-led stewardship, and erodes the principles of climate justice it claims to uphold.”
According to the group, the TFFF poses grave risks to Africa, home to some of the world’s most biodiverse forests and climate-vulnerable communities.
“Instead of empowering African nations, the Facility risks tightening financial dependence and eroding local sovereignty over forest resources,” the Africa MBPP said
Countries including Nigeria, Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Liberia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Togo, and Uganda are being drawn into a system, the group says, that places investor returns above community needs.
“What it offers is not real climate finance, but new layers of external bureaucracy and financial engineering, the group warned.
According to the coalition, the TFFF’s model, which centres a large investment fund whose returns are prioritised for investors before any payments reach countries, risks deepening corporate influence and excluding frontline communities whose knowledge and custodianship have long protected biodiversity. The Fund proposes to pay countries about US$4 per hectare of standing forest annually, an amount the coalition describes as tokenistic compared to the ecological, cultural, and economic value of tropical forests and the real costs of community-led protection.
Far from advancing the Paris Agreement or Africa’s restoration goals, the coalition added, the TFFF “threatens to divert attention and resources away from genuine, community-led climate actions towards opaque financial schemes whilst replacing public accountability with private financial interests at the same time.”
The group criticised the Facility’s financing structure, noting that it functions less like a climate-response mechanism and more like a financial vehicle designed to generate market-based returns. The coalition expressed concerns that forest payments are tied to the performance of the facility’s investment portfolio, meaning countries receive only what is left after investor obligations are met.
It argued that this approach represents “a blatant privatisation of forest finance, rooted in speculation rather than sustainability.”
“By contrast, if even 1 percent of the $2.7 trillion spent annually on global military budgets were redirected, it would free up $27 billion a year – over six times what the TFFF’s risky, market-based model promises.”
According to the coalition, this comparison “exposes the TFFF for what it truly is: a profit-making instrument disguised as climate action.”
The MBPP Coalition also condemned the decision to appoint the World Bank as trustee of the TFFF, describing it as a regressive and exclusionary arrangement that undermines local ownership and accountability.
“Experience has shown that World Bank–led climate finance centralises power, delays funding, and silences frontline communities, making the TFFF another bureaucratic obstacle rather than a climate solution,” the coalition added.
“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.”
For Mokoena Ndivile from Gender CC Southern Africa, “Forest preservation is not a privilege; it is a right tied to the survival, dignity, and livelihoods of communities, especially women who depend on the forest for sustenance and resilience. Handing control of the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF) to the World Bank risks turning this right into another instrument of financial control, and we will not accept that.”
Similarly, Kwami Kpondzo of the Global Forest Coalition (GFC) expressed concern that “World Bank involvement in TFFF would marginalise knowledge of indigenous peoples and local communities, prioritise corporate profit over community needs, thereby weakening local ownership and stewardship of forest resources.’’
The coalition insisted that the TFFF‘s governance structure fails to represent or prioritise the Global South. “Its systems for access and oversight, it said, are built to serve financiers, rather than forest peoples.
The TFFF offers no path to justice, only an illusion of progress,” the coalition concluded. “True climate action will not come from financial schemes or distant institutions, but from the communities that have always protected the forests with their lives.”
The MBPP urged world leaders to reject the Facility and instead support transparent, community-led climate finance systems that strengthen, not undermine, local control and environmental justice.
