Forests, Yes; Funding, Yes - But Any Meaningful Engagement On Fossil Fuels Highly Unlikely At Climate Summit [View all]

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World leaders who jetted in over the Amazon rainforest, its green vastness scarred and pockmarked by widespread logging, ranches and small individual farm clearings, are in no doubt as to Brazil’s key demand from them: to sign up to the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF). For the presidency, this will be the single most important achievement of Cop30: a fund that will be used to keep existing forests standing. Brazil wants to gather pledges of $25bn for the TFFF initially, using this to attract a further $100bn from the global financial markets. The money would be dispensed to forested regions, rewarding them for reducing deforestation and providing finance for biodiversity conservation work.

But the subject the hosts seem much less comfortable with is the root cause of the climate crisis: fossil fuels. At Cop28 in Dubai in 2023, a historic resolution was made – that the world must “transition away from fossil fuels”. It may seem astonishing that this was the first time in 30 years of talks the subject had been addressed directly – the intransigence of petrostates and the need for consensus within the UN process had prevented such a move before. As soon as it was over, fellow petrostates – chiefly Saudi Arabia – began to try to unpick the agreement. At Cop29 in Azerbaijan – another economy heavily dependent on exporting oil and gas – attempts to reaffirm the resolution were stymied.

Supporters want to pick up the fight again this year, though about 50 countries are thought to want to prevent it being discussed. Brazil ranks in the top 10 global oil and gas exporters, and is prospecting for new fields, some of them offshore from the Amazon. The country’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has strongly defended the rights of poor countries to carry on exploiting their resources, arguing it is the rich countries that have benefited from them for two centuries, and caused the climate crisis, who must stop.

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“It undermines the credibility of Cop if Cop can’t deal with fossil fuels,” says Leo Roberts at the E3G thinktank. If there is such a discussion, it can only take place in the context of a global “just transition”, argue civil society groups. That means ensuring that workers, the poor and the vulnerable are not abandoned or exploited in the race to clean energy.

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https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2025/nov/09/amid-squabbles-bombast-and-competing-interests-what-can-cop30-achieve