On Friday, at least 100 indigenous protesters blocked the entrance to the 30th annual UN climate change conference. KS30in Belem, Brazil. Action follows action earlier this week as hundreds of Indigenous people attended the conference, clashing with security and pushing through metal detectors as they urged negotiators to protect their lands.
These actions brought indigenous voices to the forefront of this year's global climate summit, where discussions now and historically Indigenous peoples are generally excluded and prospects. World leaders have sought to acknowledge the oversight, with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva saying indigenous voices should “inspire” COP30 and the host country announcing two new plans to protect rainforests and secure indigenous land rights. But demonstrations like this week show that even these measures were developed without much input from victims, prompting criticism.
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Conserving the Amazon rainforest is critical to mitigating climate change and protecting biodiversity. The way this is done is one of key issues raised at COP30. At the beginning of the conference, Brazil announced Object “Rainforests Forever”TFFF, or TFFF, is part of a plan to create new financial incentives to protect rainforest land in 74 countries, including its own.
The Rainforests Forever Fund is being touted as one of Brazil's new strategic policies to combat the climate crisis. It also potentially offers Brazil the opportunity to position itself as a leader in environmental protection and indigenous rights. The country has a historically poor track record of tropical forest conservation, with some estimates saying 13 percent of the original Amazon forest has been lost. to deforestation. In Brazil, this is largely due to industrial agriculture, particularly livestock and soy production. Research has shown 70 percent of cleared Amazon land is used for livestock pasture.. Brazil is the world's leading exporter of beef and soybeans, and China is the largest consumer of both products.
The TFFF marks an attempt to upend the economics of extractive industries by paying governments annually to deforestation rates of 0.5 percent or lower. It also seeks to highlight the role that Indigenous communities already play in managing these lands, although critics say neither goal goes far enough.
Under the TFFF, which will be hosted by the World Bank, Brazil aims to attract $25 billion in investment from other countries as well as philanthropic organizations, and then take that money and quadruple it in the bond market. The goal is to create a $125 billion investment fund that will be used to reward governments for preserving their pristine rainforests. One of the conditions for receiving this funding is that governments must then donate 20 percent to indigenous peoples and local communities.
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The idea behind the fund is that TFFF can make leaving tropical forests alone more financially rewarding than cutting them down. There are currently no mechanisms in the global climate finance market that value “tropical forests and rainforests as a global public good,” said Toerris Jäger, director of the Rainforest Fund of Norway. These ecosystems “need to be nurtured and supported, and that’s what TFFF does,” he added.
But critics say the TFFF simply represents another attempt to tie the value of these critical ecosystems to financial markets. “You can’t put a price on a preserved forest because life cannot be measured, and the Amazon is life for the thousands of creatures that inhabit it and depend on it,” said Toia Mancineri, a leader of the Mancineri indigenous people in Brazil. Mancineri is also the general coordinator for the coordination of indigenous organizations in the Brazilian Amazon.
He added that setting aside 20 per cent of TFFF funds for Indigenous communities is a good start, but the figure could be much higher.
Other COP30 participants criticized the plan for attempting to crack down on commercial industries that lead to deforestation for profit. “TFFF is not a climate proposal, but another false solution to the planetary crises of biodiversity loss, forest loss and climate collapse,” said Mary Lou Malig, policy director of the Global Forest Coalition. “This is another way to capitalize on problems that were actually created by the same players, such as big banks, powerful governments and corporations.”
But the effectiveness of TFFF depends on market fluctuations, risk and the state of the global economy each year. How much the government and First Nations receive each year depends on how well the market performs that year.
Mancineri added that global climate policy to protect tropical forests must do more to recognize the role indigenous peoples play in protecting them from illegal land grabs that lead to deforestation. These communities “will continue to protect” the rainforest, Mancineri said, “with or without the fund. But we need the government to recognize our climate power and our role as custodians of biodiversity.”
Before COP30, Brazil and nine other tropical countries joined the Intergovernmental Land Tenure Commitment (ILTC), a global initiative to recognize indigenous land tenure and rights to protection from deforestation and provide potential local support to support efforts such as the TFFF.
This commitment and the accompanying $1.8 billion forest and land tenure pledge that will support these land recognition efforts are “very welcome,” according to Juan Carlos Jintiac, executive secretary of the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities. However, significant progress among participating countries entails the creation of monitoring tools that take into account and ensure that indigenous peoples see the means and recognize their rights.
“We cannot have climate change adaptation, climate change mitigation or climate justice without territorial land rights and recognition and demarcation of Indigenous territories,” said Zimil Adler, senior policy advocate for forests, land and climate finance at Friends of the Earth USA.
But there is little evidence of this recognition. Under the Paris Agreement, signatories are required to submit climate action plans called “nationally determined contributions” or NDCs. A recent report Experts from around the world who analyzed NDCs from 85 countries found that only 20 of those countries cite indigenous rights and that only five mention free, prior and informed consent—a principle of international consultation that allows indigenous peoples to grant, withhold or withdraw their consent at any time to projects that affect their communities or territories.
“This was a real missed opportunity to strengthen those commitments around land rights and land tenure,” said Kate Dooley, a researcher at the University of Melbourne and author of the land gap report.
With the conference set to continue for another week, the protests have raised questions about the difference between climate talks and action, and whether this year's COP will lead to the latter for indigenous communities who see deforestation and weak land tenure as an immediate threat to their lives and homes.
“We don't eat money. We want our territory to be free,” said Cacique Gilson, a Tupinmba leader who took part in one of the protests. “But the oil exploration, mining and logging business continues.”
