COP30's Big Idea: Tropical Forests and Climate Change

TRANSCRIPT:

Seth Larson: Hey all. Before we dive into today's episode, here's today's Wild Guess trivia segment. In our last episode, we asked which spooky species the witches in Hocus Pocus turned the young boy into near the start of that film. The answer, of course, is a black cat. Congrats to those of you who got it right. For this week, as you'll hear in today's episode, this year's Climate COP, COP30 will be hosted in Brazil. When and where was the last Climate COP that took place in South America? Name the year and the country. Drop your guesses in the comment section on YouTube or Spotify, or email us at [email protected]. Good luck!

Welcome to Nature Breaking a podcast produced by World Wildlife Fund. I'm Seth Larson. Next week marks the beginning of the annual UN Climate Conference, known this year as COP30.

One of the big focuses of this year's conference is expected to be the launch of the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, a global initiative led by Brazil and other tropical forest nations. Brazil also happens to be hosting this year's conference. The facility, or the TFFF for short, aims to address one of the core problems driving deforestation around the globe.

Namely that forests are too often considered to be more valuable once they're cut down than they would be if left standing. That means that governments, communities, and especially private companies, have a greater incentive to clear a forest and turn it into, say, agricultural land, than they do to keep it intact.

The TFFF would reverse this by establishing a fund with money from governments, philanthropic organizations, and the private sector that pays countries to keep forest standing. It's all pretty complicated, but it's going to be a big deal at COP30. So today I asked Andrew Deutz, WWF's Managing Director for Global Policy and Partnerships, to help us make sense of it.

Andrew's been participating in the negotiations to shape the TFFF over the last year, and he's well positioned to walk us through it. Before we get started, please be sure to like this episode and subscribe to our channel wherever you're catching this. And now here's my conversation with Andrew.

Andrew Deutz, welcome back to Nature Breaking.

Andrew Deutz: Great to be back.

Seth Larson: So I want to start this conversation by just getting into some of the basics and asking you to explain what the heck is this thing called the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, and what would it do? What problem would it be solving?

Andrew Deutz: In one very long run-on sentence, the TFFF is a bold initiative sponsored by the government of Brazil to create, in effect, the world's largest conservation trust fund that would pay tropical forest countries to maintain their standing forests. To get long into the details, the idea is create a large trust fund that would generate enough money to pay countries $4 per hectare for each hectare of standing tropical forests as long as they meet certain eligibility criteria. Like their deforestation rate has to be below 0.5%, their deforestation rate has to be trending downward over time. And for any residual deforestation or degradation, they would get a discount.

So they would get less money out of it. It solves one of the critical problems in forest finance, which is it puts a value on standing forests. Right now most of the market mechanisms out there reward countries for chopping down the forest and turning it into soy plantations, or cattle grazing, or timber, or any number of other uses. Carbon markets will reward countries that have a deforestation problem if they reduce their deforestation rate. So it's like rewarding the D students for becoming B students, but there's no mechanism out there right now that rewards countries for maintaining their standing forests. The TFFF would do that.

So for a country like Gabon that has not started a major deforestation problem, it would pay them to keep the forest standing, as opposed to this perverse incentive that if they cut it down, someone would pay them to stop doing that.

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Andrew Deutz: It would also reward countries like Brazil that had a major deforestation problem and over the last couple of years have more or less gotten that under control. So it would reward them for that and incentivize them to maintain a very low or zero deforestation rate going forward.

Seth Larson: That's all super interesting. I know it's also super complicated. We're going to get into some of the details of the mechanism and how it works and how countries would actually be rewarded and all that in, just a minute.

Before we get into all that, you've really had a seat at the table in helping to bring this facility together. Over the last year, you've been in a lot of the meetings talking about how to structure it, what some of the pros and cons might be to different approaches. Can you just bring us into that process a little bit? What have those meetings been like? Who's been participating and what's your takeaway been?

Andrew Deutz: So Brazil kicked off this idea about two years ago at a previous Climate COP saying they wanted to create this mechanism. They then brought together 12 countries, so six tropical forest countries. So Brazil, Colombia, Ghana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia, Malaysia, together with six sponsor countries from the industrialized world: US, Germany, Norway, France, UK and the UAE, who had traditionally been donors in the forest sector. And that group of 12 countries has spent the last year and a half trying to hash out the proposal of what this could look like. Dealing with all the science questions around the forest eligibility issues, dealing with the financial architecture of what this could look like to generate enough money. Dealing with the governance structure of the partnership in the fund. They've been relying heavily on the World Bank, which just today as we're recording this, agreed to host the facility and provide the secretariat for it and the trustee services. So manage the money in a sense.

And then they've, there've been a few NGOs like WWF and others supporting on the technical side and some of the advocacy. We've helped organize some of the civil society consultations around this. And then the other critical partner has been the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities, which is the largest network of Indigenous Peoples organizations who've been one of the groups at the table helping to design what this means for Indigenous Peoples is one of the critical, partners in both developing it and benefiting from the financial flows that will come.

Seth Larson: Yeah. And I was going to ask you this in a few minutes, but let's just tackle it here since you just mentioned it. One of the big things that WWF as a network, as a global institution has been advocating for is that Indigenous Peoples and local communities will be able to derive a certain percentage of the benefits from this facility once it's up and running. And I'd love for you to speak a little more about why that's been so important and where we landed on that.

Andrew Deutz: Yeah. So this is one of the most important and interesting innovations in this whole structure. Let me step back for a minute and say, the estimate is that this thing could generate somewhere between $2 and $4 billion a year in financial flows.

Seth Larson: Yeah, that's wild.

Andrew Deutz: If it gets fully capitalized at $125 billion. That's a big aspiration, but from the beginning, Brazil has insisted that 20% of the funding has to go to Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

So any government that qualifies would get a payment and 20% of that has to be set aside for Indigenous Peoples and local communities. This contains a couple of really interesting innovations compared to the other mechanisms that are out there. The Biodiversity Convention has spawned the Cali Fund. It spawned the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund over the last couple of years. Which include provisions that some portion of those international funding mechanisms should go be or be set aside for Indigenous Peoples and local communities. This is a step change difference. For number one, this creates the possibility of direct access.

Yeah, and what I mean by that is. With the other funds and there's a, pathway in the TFFF that the money would go, the 20% would go to the government, and then the government would have to put it into a trust fund. And then the Indigenous Peoples would set up a steering committee that would then decide how the money would be spent.

But it's still going through the government. The Indigenous Peoples and local communities groups have been advocating that they want direct access to it, directly from the fund, managed by the World Bank that bypasses governments. There has been an agreement to do that. Or have a structure that will work like that.

Seth Larson: Wow.

Andrew Deutz: Now governments itself have to agree that's the way the money's going to flow. But this has been one of the major innovations. The second big thing is just the amount of money that's out there. Again, if 20% of two... we ran the numbers. If you were to apply this structure to the 2024 deforestation rates, it would generate about $2 billion worth of financial flows. Like half a billion dollars to Brazil, about $200 million to Democratic Republic of Congo, like $160 or $180 million to Indonesia.

Seth Larson: Wow.

Andrew Deutz: Real money. Take 20% of $200 million. That's $40 million dollars that would be set aside for Indigenous Peoples and local communities in the DRC. That is a huge, like order of magnitude bigger than any existing international flows. The third big innovation is the notion that each country has to establish a national steering committee comprised of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, and that steering committee will decide how the money will be allocated, goes into a trust fund. They decide how the trust fund gets allocated and pick who's going to be managing the money. So this is an unprecedented level of decision making authority for Indigenous Peoples and local communities over an unprecedented amount of money.

So it really is a game changer in terms of potential funding flows for Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

Seth Larson: Yeah, that's super exciting. Such an innovation and really, great news on that front. I know it's been a priority for WWF and a lot of other organizations for many years to find ways for Indigenous Peoples to really...

Andrew Deutz: I should also note that it helps that Brazil has been pushing this. So the Global Alliance on Territorial Communities was at the table co-designing it, but at the end of the day, this is a new innovative mechanism that's really pushing the boundaries.

The Brazilian Minister of Environment, Marina Silva and the Brazilian Minister of Indigenous Affairs, Sônia Guajajara, put their fingers on the scale in favor of what the Indigenous People's advocates were asking for. So you've got a, like the government at the center of this really embracing and empowering Indigenous communities to take on this opportunity.

Seth Larson: So let's focus for another second on Brazil. Brazil's hosting COP30 TFFF is going to be launching at COP30. Brazil has been a major proponent of the TFFF and really leading this process forward. What are we really expecting to happen at COP30, launching the TFFF? And then what are the next steps after that to turn this into a functioning reality?

Andrew Deutz: So we're expecting that the magic moment will happen over lunch on November 6th. President Lula is hosting heads of state, presidents and prime ministers, on the 6th and 7th, and they've set aside, right now at least, the lunch hour on November 6th to be the launch event and sort of family photo for the TFFF.

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Andrew Deutz: Brazil has already put a billion dollars on the table. President Lula announced that at the UN General Assembly in September. It's a big deal. And that's the incentive for other countries to come in. Remember, this is a developing country, putting a billion dollar investment on the table.

So we're anticipating that the UK, Germany, Norway, at a minimum, will come in with billion or multi-billion dollar announcements as well, and there's a few other governments that might come in as well. So we expect, hopefully we get to four or $5 billion in new commitments announced. In addition, Brazil is trying to get as many tropical forest countries as possible to sign a letter of intent to say, "we support this, we want to participate. We will run the traps to get to the eligibility criteria, to be able to participate in the governance structure and be able to receive funding over time." So hopefully we come out with several billion dollars more on the table, a whole bunch of developing countries with forests saying they wanna participate.

We already have the World Bank saying that they will host it. And so there's, now there'll be a bank account where the donor or investor countries can send the checks. Then the next steps, we think there's a... that gets us maybe $5 or $6 billion. It's still a long way to go to get to $25 billion of the sponsor capital.

And then that leverages up to about a hundred billion with institutional investors coming in. So we think there'll be a second round of opportunity for other sovereign governments to come in as investors. Norway, UK and Germany have been at that core group in the table designing this for the last 18 months, so they understand it pretty well and know what they're investing in.

There's a whole bunch of other governments in Europe, so Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, potentially the European Commission, Canada, Australia, Japan, Singapore, and then a number of the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and China that the Brazilians have been talking to that they, that might be able to come in as the second round of investors once they recognize: A, there's money on the table. B, the structure has been tested and works, and so this is a known entity that we can invest in and that'll start to scale up. And then third, it'll take a little time for the facility hosted by the World Bank to collect that capital from the governments and use it to underwrite the issuance of bonds that can be sold to institutional investors to bring in more capital that will then be used to invest in a diversified portfolio of high income bonds. That will then start generating the revenue that can be used to a repay the investors and B, pay the tropical forest countries. So the first sequence on November 6th is we get several billion dollars more of commitments.

Then over the next year or so, we get more sovereigns investing in. Then we get the ability to issue bonds, to bring in more private money, hopefully in order, in several times, several X of what the governments have put in that gets invested and then starts generating returns. So it's probably three or four years till we're able to start paying out to countries.

It's going to take a little while to ramp up.

Seth Larson: Gotcha. So this is the big bang moment at COP30.

Andrew Deutz: This, I would say, this is the existential moment. If it doesn't happen here, there is no other political forcing mechanism. This is Brazil, this is President Lula. This is the COP in the Amazon. Brazil's put a billion dollars on the table. This is when we need the other core sovereign investors to come in to prove this works, and then we can scale from there.

Seth Larson: Yeah. Let's talk a little more about the actual functioning of the facility and how this would work in practice, once we get to that point where it's actually providing payments and issuing bonds and everything.

So as you said earlier, the core idea behind the TFFF is that it's going to pay tropical forest countries to keep their tropical forests standing. How will those funds really be distributed? And I think even more interestingly to me, how are we going to ver... not we WWF, but how is the World Bank and the other investors, countries, and private investors, how are they going to verify that countries are keeping tropical forests standing? What does that look like and how are we determining who's really eligible and how those payments are going to get to doled out?

Andrew Deutz: The very simple answer is we run the satellites over all these countries, measure their deforestation, measure their forest degradation, do the calculation of whether or not they meet the eligibility criteria. And if they do write them a check. In reality, of course, it's never that simple.

Seth Larson: I was going to say that sounds too simple.

Andrew Deutz: There's a very sophisticated set of requirements around what the forest monitoring needs to look like, what reports governments need to be able to provide to the TFFF Secretariat as part of the eligibility criteria for this.

One of the core factors for Brazil has been the notion that they want to determine for themselves what their deforestation is. Now, Brazil has its own space agency. They have the capability to do that to international standards that can be peer reviewed by any scientists anywhere and know that this is quality data.

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Andrew Deutz: Some other countries have that capability. Not all countries do. For some countries, they'll have to rely on international data sets, whether it's the Food and Agriculture organization or WRI or University of Maryland that produces these data sets. So countries will have to submit: this is our deforestation, this is our, what our satellite analysis tells us of our deforestation and our degradation, and whether we qualify or not, and how much. The TFFF secretariat hosted at the World Bank will then have independent third parties verify those numbers or at least the methodologies behind them.

And then the TFFF Council, so the basically like the board of it made up of both sponsor countries, investor countries, and tropical forest countries will certify that and then write the check. Once the check gets written, again, 20% goes to Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

The other 80% is a pay for performance. So governments have wide discretion to do with it what they want. This is not project financing. You're not paying for a particular protected area. You're giving the government money to do what it wants. The one requirement is they have to spend it in the forest sector.

And they have to report on how they're using the money so that they can be held accountable by their own civil society. But at the end of the day, governments have a broad discretion on how they use it. Presumably they'll use it to maintain low deforestation rates. 'Cause if they keep low deforestation rates, they get paid again the next year.

Seth Larson: What are some examples of ways that governments might use that funding? I imagine it might be things like funding national park programs, that protect certain areas from development. What else? What else are you thinking about?

Andrew Deutz: Yeah, so Brazil has this program called Bolsa Familia, which is a program that supports community development, rural livelihood, rural healthcare provision in rural areas and they've said we wanna scale up that program and provide more support to forest stewards and forest beneficiaries, as the way that they want to use that money. Other governments haven't quite worked this out. Yeah. I think that's going to be one of the more interesting things where civil society is going to sit down with governments and say, if you've got all this money coming in, how are we going to spend it and spend it wisely?

Just a word on that. We've run the numbers. As I said, if you apply the 2024 deforestation rate to the eligibility criteria, you would get... there's about $2 billion that would get paid out to tropical forest countries.

Seth Larson: Wow.

Andrew Deutz: And, in many of those countries that payment is more money than these countries are receiving in bilateral biodiversity aid flows.

So you think about all the money that donor governments are giving to tropical forest countries, in many cases for eligible countries, they'll get more money out of the TFFF.

Seth Larson: Wow.

Andrew Deutz: So this is a lot of money coming in. You wanna make sure it's spent well. And so you want civil society engaged in the decision making and providing guidance both on how it's spent and making sure that governments are spending it the way they say that they're supposed to be spending it.

Seth Larson: Yeah. This is just a huge incentive signal, in the direction of keep forest standing, which is such a exciting and really innovative and hopefully effective mechanism that we're going to see going forward. I did wanna put a finer point on one thing you said earlier that Brazil has already ponied up and pledged the first billion dollars into this facility.

Talk a little more about why that was such a big deal coming out of Climate Week in September, that this developing country is the first one to stand up. And yes, they obviously have a lot of standing forest, so they stand to be a beneficiary of this as well, but it's really an important signal that they were the first ones to put that money into the pot, right?

Andrew Deutz: Yeah, so let me step back for a minute and if you just to think about the politics around climate finance in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the ongoing demand has been that developed countries need to pay more money for climate mitigation, for adaptation, and for loss and damage. Yep. And this is generally perceived to be in the form of grant financing to developing countries.

Seth Larson: And this is because the argument has always been developed countries like the US have done the most to cause climate change over the long arc of the last a hundred years or so, and, and developing countries are paying the price without reaping all the benefits.

Andrew Deutz: It's both. Developed countries have been the biggest historic emitters. So sure. They bear the burden of responsibility for the problem, but also they have the most capability because they're the wealthiest countries. Yeah.

The countries that are quote, developed versus developing in the climate convention were set when the climate convention was adopted back in 1992.

The world looks very different today. China is now the second largest economy in the world. India has now like as big as any, some of the G-7 countries.

Saudi Arabia, UAE, some of the other Gulf states have per capita incomes as high or higher than the United States. So the donor countries have been arguing for a long time we need to expand the donor pool and bring some of these new countries in. And that's obviously a very contentious debate.

Seth Larson: Indeed.

Andrew Deutz: Brazil has completely reframed that debate. 'Cause this is not about donors. This is not about grant money. This is about investments. So all of the sponsor countries that are being asked to put money on the table are being asked to make investments that they, that will get paid back with interest over time.

And so Brazil has made the first investment. So we're not arguing about broadening the donor base, we're arguing about opening up the investor space. So China is considering making an investment. UAE. Saudi Arabia have been approached by Brazil, a number of other large countries in the developing world as well.

So you can think about changing the dynamics that we're not talking, we're not arguing about grants and aid, we're arguing about investments, and that's a very different proposition. China is one of the largest capital exporters in the world. It can afford to invest a billion or several billion dollars into this fund just as much as a Norway or Germany can.

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Andrew Deutz: And it would get paid back with interest.

Seth Larson: So that's, we've talked a lot so far about nations that might be investing in the TFFF to get it off the ground. Yeah, you covered earlier that the goal ultimately is to have $25 billion in capitalization from the public sector, from governments, and an additional a hundred billion from the private sector.

And I wanna focus on that side of the ledger for a moment and just ask you to explain... private sector investors, they are going to be responsible to shareholders. They have a responsibility to turn a profit. They're not all going to be investing in this purely because they love forests and they just wanna keep them standing.

They're going to want to see a return on their investment. So what, talk about the incentive that the private sector has to get involved in something like this, and what is the kind of return that they might expect to see?

Andrew Deutz: So I'm going to get a little wonky on you in financial speak.

Seth Larson: You go for it. Please do.

Andrew Deutz: But let me give you an example first. The largest source of funding for global development, for least developed countries is the International Development Association, right? That is one that is the World Bank's concessional lending window. The World Bank just completed a replenishment where they raised $24 billion of capital from the donor countries that goes into this pot.

The World Bank takes that money and then issues bonds. The World Bank is considered a super safe investment. So it has AAA rating in its bonds. Which means it's only paying a very small premium above what you would buy, you would get if you bought US treasuries, which historically are considered the safest asset.

That's like the risk-free investment. So the World Bank offers a just a slight premium because they're AAA rated, they're considered gold standard, super safe.

The TFFF works on a similar principle, so that sponsor capital of $125 billion is or, the sponsor capital of $25 billion, is in what's called a first loss position, meaning it's underwriting or backstopping the issuance of another hundred billion dollars worth of bonds that would be bought by institutional investors.

So any institu... think about your pension fund or any institutional investor. They're investing in lots of different assets and trying to manage risks. So they're going to buy a lot of zero risk US treasuries or World Bank bonds or AAA rated bonds that have very little risk and they're going to invest in some other things like any number of stocks in the stock market.

Yeah, they're going to be riskier but might return more. What the TFFF is offering is... we haven't seen the credit rating yet from the credit rating agencies, but the assumption is that the financial structure, because there's $25 billion of sponsor capital that's in a first loss position, pretty much means that the bonds that'll be issued to an institutional investors will be AA or AAA rated.

So institutional investors would expect a very small rate of return. Maybe half a percentage point over what they could do with US treasuries. They'll buy them up. If there's a market downturn the risk is that the governments don't get paid their interest payment and absorb the losses so that the institutional investors still get their payment, right?

And that's why it's got a high credit rating. So if you are, say, BlackRock and you're managing your 401k, you're going to buy a bunch of those almost zero risk bonds, in part, as part of your investment portfolio. So that's what they're interested in. So this fits their asset allocation model. That some portion of their bonds need to be AAA rated World Bank, US treasury, TFFF type bonds.

Yep. ' Cause they're not bearing the risk. It's the sovereigns that are bearing the risk. Actually, to be honest, the tropical forest countries are bearing the biggest risk. If there's a market downturn and there's no returns one year the tropical forest countries don't get paid.

The sponsor governments get paid second.

The institutional investors, the private sector investors get paid first.

Seth Larson: Yeah. Yeah. And this is, gets to one of the critiques that we've seen coming out as we get closer to launching the TFFF. One of the critiques has been that this is too risky putting all this money in the bond market and potentially creating a situation where governments are on the hook, they don't get their money back, or investors get left in the lurch. Tropical forest countries that may become dependent on this funding going forward could get a shortfall where they don't have funding that they've been counting on, and then that contributes to tropical forest loss down the road. Can you respond a little more directly to some of those critiques?

Andrew Deutz: Sure. So let's start with the base case.

Where are we today? Yeah. There's not enough money for forests. So some new innovative mechanism that could generate a few billion dollars a year is upside. The financial structure is new and innovative. This is something new in development finance. One of the advantages of this investment... you're using capital markets to try and generate returns to pay tropical forest countries.

But if you think for a minute, how does Harvard, what does Harvard do with its endowment? What does the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund do with its sovereign wealth fund? They turn to professional investors, say, invest this, manage the risk. Earn me some money. In effect, that's what the TFFF is doing, except the client is the tropical forest countries.

So you create this capital stack with sovereigns and institutional investors, professional money managers try to manage it, manage the risk, earn some returns, assuming there are returns, they're paying tropical forest countries. What's different is using the same type of investing techniques that support pension funds, that support university endowments, that support 401Ks for regular investors is now being used to support tropical forest countries. If this actually works as a model of development finance, it could be applied to other sectors, healthcare, education and what have you. The forest is the first innovation to try this and see if it works.

Seth Larson: Yeah, no, that's really interesting. And thank you for addressing that. I know it's something we've been hearing a little bit, but I think by and large, a lot of people are really optimistic about the innovation and the potential of this model to really deliver some important results.

Andrew Deutz: There's two things really innovative here. A lot of things innovative, but two, particularly from the, in terms of the financial model. The Holy Grail of climate finance has always been to try and leverage private investment. When you look at the accounting of this, the... climate finance world and the a hundred billion that was promised from Copenhagen, the original thought was, we're going to leverage private sector funding three to one.

In reality, over the last decade, every $3 of public funding is leveraged $1 private funding.

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Andrew Deutz: That's not winning. This, if it, if the financial model works, would have a leverage ratio of $1 of public actually leveraging $4 of private. Yeah. So that's what we've been trying to do and maybe we've actually found a financial structure that works to do that.

The other critical innovation here is that the fund doesn't run out. So you capitalize it once. It continues to generate returns and pay tropical forest countries, you don't need to go back and replenish it. So if you think about the Green Climate fund or the, Global Environment Facility, yep. They need to be replenished every four years as they're giving out grant capital.

The same with the International Development Association, this big World Bank fund. The sponsor countries are putting in concessional capital that gets used up over four years and they've gotta go back and replenish. So this was IDA 21, right? There've been 20 previous replenishments of this every four years.

Yeah. The magic of the TFFF is that it's built on a model that says we need to pay $4 a hectare to about a billion hectares of tropical forests. But we're assuming that not every country is going to qualify every year. And even for countries that do there, there's a discount if there is any residual deforestation.

So you're probably not going to be paying out a hundred percent of the returns every year. So some portion of those returns stay in the capital stack and keep earning interest and compound over time. So eventually you're able to pay back the sovereign investors with interest. Keep rolling over the funding to support the institutional investors and replace the sovereign sponsor with this retained capital.

So at the end of the day, the sovereigns are paid out, the capital stack remains intact, and the fund is going on forever, as the name implies. Yep. Without ever having to be replenished the way you have to replenish a lot of other climate and development finance funds.

Seth Larson: Yeah. And I think that's a really important point, particularly as we've seen across the world in the last five, 10 years, governments and political upheaval has been ever present everywhere around the world. And to create a scenario where you're asking governments to re-litigate every four years or eight years, or whatever it is, whether they're going to continue contributing to a certain fund, it just creates the potential for instability in that fund. Whereas this, it's a one time that once the governments make a contribution once, it's not like they're going to have to re-litigate this eight years from now when there might be a different leader in place with different ideas.

Andrew Deutz: Exactly.

Seth Larson: So Andrew, I have one last question for you before I let you go.

Just bringing this back to a general audience, we've spent a lot of time in the weeds and finance and, there's lots of stuff that you've taught me today that I'm still wrapping my head around. But big picture for listeners who really care about this stuff, care about keeping forests standing, care about addressing climate change, but aren't really experts in all this stuff. What's one thing that you want them to know about the Tropical Forest Forever Facility and why it's so important?

Andrew Deutz: So we're trying to use capital markets like the savvy investors that, as I say, invest and manage Harvard's Endowment or an Norway Sovereign Wealth Fund or your 401k, and use that savvy and expertise to generate funding, to give grant funding to tropical forests, to keep their forest standing. The world is desperate to figure out a way, how do we pay for the global services that forests provide? This is one more tool in the toolbox that looks different than what we've seen before. And as I say. It's based on an investment model, not grants, because grant funding in foreign aid markets has been falling off the cliff this year.

Yeah, so this is almost custom built for this moment because it's based on investment. It doesn't have to be replenished. It leverages private finance and it provides unprecedented funding for Indigenous Peoples and local communities. There's an awful lot to like here.

Seth Larson: That's great. Andrew, thank you so much for walking us through this today. Congratulations for all the work that you've put in and getting this off the ground. I know it's a really exciting moment for you and for all of us at WWF, but thank you for explaining it to us and we look forward to seeing what happens in Brazil at COP30.

Andrew Deutz: Thank you. Me too.

Seth Larson: That'll do it for today's episode. Thanks again to Andrew for breaking down this really exciting, but also pretty complicated new approach to protecting forests. As he said, COP30 will mark a really important launch point for the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, but this is the beginning of a long process to start delivering benefits to tropical forest countries.

We'll keep an eye on that process over the coming months and years, and we'll look for moments to have Andrew back on the show to provide some updates. If all goes well, it'll hopefully produce a much brighter future for the world's forest and the countless people and species that depend on them.

Thanks for listening today and together let's keep building a more sustainable future.

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COP30’s Big Idea: The Tropical Forest Forever Facility