BLOG POST: Some considerations on forest governance and incursion economies at the end of COP30

27/11/25 | Margherita Scazza

COP30, dubbed by its organisers as the “COP of the Amazon”, has come to an end this past Saturday 25 November. I have spent over a week in Belém moving between events in the Blue and Green Zones, as well as parallel talks and workshops hosted by the People’s Summit and the COP of the People. Across all these spaces, debates about what just transitions actually mean and how they might be achieved have taken centre stage. Many discussions probed the geographies of power shaping current transition roadmaps. Participants critiqued their growing reliance on so-called transition minerals such as lithium, cobalt, and copper and noted that such transitions continue to operate through extractivist logics that risk reproducing the very inequalities associated with fossil-intensive economies. Any credible action plan for a just transition must grapple with the close interconnection of workers’ livelihoods on the ground and global systems of production and consumption. This is why research that bridges global drivers of extraction with the personal motivations that underpin frontier and incursion economies is crucial for anticipating future patterns of forest degradation and habitat fragmentation.

The governance of the Amazon rainforest also emerged as a defining theme of events organised within and around COP30. A strong presence of Indigenous participants and representatives, who travelled from across the Amazon basin, brought the issue forcefully onto the agenda. They organised demonstrations and filled the streets of Belém during the Peoples’ March on Saturday 15 November, to put pressure on the negotiations. Across the Green Zone – a space for civil society organisations, youth groups and the public – this concern was taken up through a range of conservation and Amazon-related initiatives.

In this respect, COP30 introduced a new scheme: the Tropical Forests Forever Fund (TFFF). An additional step in the financialisation of tropical forests, the TFFF is an investment fund that was first proposed by Brazil at COP28 in Dubai. Its aim is to combine public and private capital into a collective fund to be invested in global markets, thus using the resulting profits to reward tropical forest nations for protecting their forests and preventing the spread of activities linked to deforestation and forest degradation. Like other schemes (e.g. the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility and Forest Investment Program, both connected to REDD), the TFFF seeks to create financial incentives for forest conservation. Indigenous and local communities are expected to receive at least 20 per cent of the funds, although the ways in which they will be distributed at the local level remains uncertain. Involving private markets in efforts to curb deforestation is neither a new idea nor one that has succeeded in the past. In the case of the TFFF scheme, while some hailed it as a potential lifeline for securing the future of tropical forests, many social movements and NGOs viewed it with suspicion. One concern is that maintaining forests remains significantly less profitable than activities such as logging, mining, or agriculture, meaning that the necessary investments may fail to materialise. There is also the risk that the fund could indirectly draw investment from private actors involved in high-risk deforestation sectors. Hence, as some critics have suggested, it may fall short of addressing the root causes of deforestation, instead relying on the financial markets that contribute to it. Finally, the scheme only requires 20 per cent canopy cover for governments to qualify for payments, a threshold considered by some as too low for a tropical forest to be regarded as intact. 

It will be important to observe and appreciate how national regulations and mechanisms introduced under this new scheme interact with small-scale incursion economies in the MAP region and across the wider Amazon. A key task of the Infracursions project is to explore the networks and socio-legal infrastructures that allow hidden economies to thrive. It is possible that the TFFF will stimulate a shift in national-level financial regulations with implications for the arrangements that underpin both illegal and informal extractive economies.