Germany promises support for Brazil’s forest initiative at UN climate talks

BELEM, Brazil (AP) – As world leaders head to a second day of climate talks being hosted in Brazil, a major proposal to protect tropical forests worldwide is sure to be a major topic of discussion.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Thursday sought to mobilize funding to halt the ongoing destruction of tropical rainforests and advance the many unmet promises made at previous summits.

He’s proposing a fund called the Tropical Forests Forever Facility that would pay 74 developing countries to keep their trees standing, using loans from wealthier nations and commercial investors. Financed by interest-bearing debt instead of donations, it aims to make it more lucrative for governments to keep their trees rather than cut them down.

The location where the proposal was announced and the talks are being held, Belem, is significant because the city is part of the Amazon rainforest, which is crucial in helping to regulate the climate.

Destroying rainforests makes money for cattle ranchers, miners and illegal loggers, but Brazil hopes to convince countries that preserving forests promises richer rewards for the entire world by absorbing huge amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that heats the planet when it’s released into the atmosphere.

As senior Brazilian officials walked reporters through the fund’s inner workings, Norway pledged $3 billion – the biggest commitment of the day – raising hopes for Lula’s ambitions to become a reality. Germany expected to follow on Friday when Lula meets Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Brazilian officials announced a total of $5.5 billion in pledges.

The fund’s rules call for 20% of the money to go to Indigenous peoples, who for millennia have managed and preserved lands. This year’s climate talks are expected to have a large presence of tribes, particularly from Brazil and surrounding countries.

But reduced participation in the summit revealed divisions among countries and focus on the many other things happening around the world. The leaders of the planet’s three biggest polluters, China, the United States and India, were absent from the preliminary gathering of world leaders ahead of the full climate talks, which begin next week.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres opened a gathering with harsh words for world powers who he said “remain captive to the fossil fuel interests, rather than protecting the public interest.”

Allowing global warming to exceed the key benchmark of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit), laid out in the 2015 Paris Agreement, would represent a “moral failure and deadly negligence,” Guterres said. He warned that “even a temporary overshoot will have dramatic consequences … every fraction of a degree higher means more hunger, displacement and loss.”

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