Forest Fund at COP30: Catalysing Informed Climate Action for India

The spotlight at the 30^th Conference of Parties (COP30) wasn’t just on new climate pledges: it was on how countries could deliver them. Leading this shift from promises to action was the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), a unique initiative to protect and restore the world’s tropical forests.

Many developing countries are home to tropical forests but often face challenges in conserving them. TFFF intends to aid ongoing efforts by driving global finance towards effective biodiversity conservation. The fund was created in response to the clear need for better incentive mechanisms to help tropical countries protect and conserve their forests at scale. Existing funds, including those for reduced deforestation, are insufficient and often fail to channel resources where they are most needed. TFFF shifts the focus to conservation and recognises the efforts of those who have worked to keep forests standing. It focuses on rigorous monitoring, penalises deforestation, promotes natural forests, and supports indigenous and local forest communities, thereby ensuring true conservation rather than cosmetic green cover gains.

This renewed focus on implementation comes at a key moment. At COP30, countries must submit their new Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) that are not only ambitious but also practical.

For India, NDCs focus on three targets: accelerating the green energy transition, reducing emissions intensity, and expanding carbon sinks. In its 2015 NDC, India set a bold target of achieving 1.5–2 billion tonnes of additional carbon dioxide equivalent (CO_2-e) sink by 2030 through additional forest and tree cover. Since then, India’s forest cover has increased, going beyond the said target and reaching an additional carbon sink of approximately 2.29 billion tonnes of CO_2-e by 2021, relative to the 2005 baseline. This signifies India’s potential to set more ambitious forest and climate goals. However, such capabilities must be matched with stronger implementation strategies.

Two fundamental questions stand in the way of setting more ambitious carbon sink targets for India: ‘how’ and ‘where’.

The primary mechanism for offsetting forest loss in the country is the Compensatory Afforestation Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA), which receives funds from projects that clear forests for development. While these funds should, in theory, support robust afforestation, reality has proven otherwise. Audits have repeatedly found substantial misallocation and poor survival rates for plantations, which ultimately fail to compensate for the rich biodiversity of the forests lost.

Further, the question of land availability looms large. The uneven distribution of ‘wastelands’ across India, where most afforestation efforts are concentrated, faces multiple competing pressures, including agricultural expansion, livestock grazing, and renewable energy development. Although land competition is significant at the national level, it becomes more nuanced at the regional level, where state priorities and local community needs may not align with national goals. For instance, in Gujarat, conservation of grasslands and wastelands is vital for pastoral communities, leading to resistance against their use for large renewable energy projects. Meanwhile, in Odisha, forests face threats from mining activities, putting both ecosystems and national forest conservation plans at risk.

This illustrates how regional land-use conflicts and ecosystem diversity make it difficult to achieve uniform national targets, underscoring the need for regionally informed, locally sensitive planning. Moreover, experts argue that blind afforestation could put other natural ecosystems, especially open natural ecosystems often misclassified as wastelands, at high risk. These non-forest natural ecosystems harbour a vast amount of endemic biodiversity and serve as natural buffers, mitigating the impacts of climate change. Their protection must be fully integrated into India’s climate and conservation targets to ensure the preservation of both biodiversity and ecological resilience.

For India, TFFF can be both a challenge and an opportunity. The fund aims to provide developing countries with performance-based payments of USD 4 per hectare for verified standing forests. This potentially amounts to USD 280–300 million annually for India and calls for stringent and transparent reporting mechanisms. However, countries could face severe penalties for deforestation and degradation, with USD 400 per hectare being deducted for deforestation and USD 100–150 for forest degradation. Placing conservation at its heart, this mechanism complements existing funding mechanisms for forests, such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+; a United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)-driven climate change mitigation approach).

However, India has chosen an observer status instead of full membership, allowing it to participate in policymaking and monitoring while remaining ineligible for direct funding. This decision reflects a balance of pragmatism and caution. Nevertheless, an observer status is less a setback and more an opening to strengthen India’s monitoring systems, invest in conservation technology, and build robust and transparent data regimes. With transparency at the forefront, the country can ensure credible forest management, suitable incentives for genuine ecological enrichment over mere expansion, and an improved policy structure for ecological protection.

The TFFF and its strict regulatory framework could fundamentally reshape how countries like India set and achieve their NDC targets. With a clearer understanding of existing forest ecosystems through enhanced monitoring systems, TFFF will enable countries to establish precise, achievable, and ecologically sound targets. By accounting for regional ecological diversity, land needs for multiple developmental goals, and climate objectives, future targets can become more integrated and realistic, paving the way for sustainable climate and conservation outcomes.