Brazil seeks to raise $10 billion for a forest protection initiative Environment and climate

Brazilian Finance Minister Fernando Haddad said that the mobilization of $10 billion in public resources forTropical Forests Forever Initiative It will be an ambitious but “feasible” goal in its first year, with an effort to raise $125 billion later.

The Brazilian Forest Finance Fund project is a pioneering project as the host country for the COP30 climate talks, and aims to raise $125 billion to support the global preservation of endangered forests.

Haddad confirmed, on the sidelines of an event in Sao Paulo, that other countries may announce their contributions to the fund during the United Nations climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém next week.

Haddad said of the initiative, “To reach $10 billion, it will be enough for a few G20 countries to join, so that we can begin to compensate countries that preserve tropical forests, especially those that are burdened with debt.”

Haddad declined to name the countries that have expressed interest in contributing to the fund, which aims to raise $25 billion from governments and charities and attract $100 billion from the private sector.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva announced last September that Latin America’s largest economy would contribute $1 billion to the fund, and urged other countries to make equally bold contributions so that the fund could become ready for action at the United Nations Climate Change Conference.

Haddad said the Indonesian government has also agreed to contribute to the fund, which will be managed like an endowment and will pay countries annual salaries based on the amount of remaining tropical forests.

At the end of last October, the Brazilian Ministry of Finance announced that the World Bank had agreed to act as financial manager and trustee of the fund.

Forests stabilize the global climate and absorb carbon dioxide. The Amazon forests are known as the lungs of the world, as they contain about 400 billion trees. Scientists estimate its age to be about 55 million years, and it covers about 6% of the Earth’s surface.

Its total area is estimated at about 5 million square kilometers, and it extends across the territories of 9 countries in South America, including 60% in Brazil. It absorbs about 1.5 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide annually.

But deforestation, increasing temperatures, and natural and artificial fires have turned some areas into a source of carbon stored by trees, which exacerbates global warming and global climate change.

And it was New study Conducted by the European Commission’s Joint Research Center, it has confirmed that fires affected 3.3 million hectares (33,000 square kilometers) of Amazon forests last year alone.

The researchers found that the 2024 fires released about 791 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is roughly equivalent to the amount of emissions produced by Germany in an entire year.