The country’s current NDC mentions that forestry and land use will contribute to reaching its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 75 per cent under the Paris Agreement from 2020 to 2030.
COP30 host Brazil is home to the Amazon, which represents more than half of the total area of remaining rainforests on the planet. The South American country is set to launch the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), a US$125 billion blended-finance mechanism, combining public, philanthropic and private capital, that would pay forest countries for maintaining standing tropical forests.
At least 20 per cent of the fund will be reserved for direct access by Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
TFFF aims to provide annual performance-based “Forest Payments” to participating tropical forest countries as an incentive for the conservation and restoration of tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests, according to the TFFF concept note.
These payments are designed to reward countries that maintain or increase their forest cover and have a deforestation rate at or below 0.5 per cent, contributing to global environmental goals while respecting national sovereignty and policy priorities. Forest Payments are currently expected to be around US$ 4 per hectare (ha) of eligible forest area, subject to annual adjustments for inflation, capped at 2 per cent per year.
However, the Philippines’ deforestation rate is one of the highest in Southeast Asia, losing 196,000 ha of primary forest from 2002 to 2024, which was 13 per cent of its total tree cover loss, according to data from Global Forest Watch. But Indonesia has lost more tree cover at 34 per cent in the same period, as with Malaysia lost 33 per cent.
The Philippines forest cover is estimated at about 7 million hectares as of the latest government data, covering around 23 to 24 per cent of the total land area, far below the 17.8 million hectares recorded in 1934.
“Based on this, there are challenges that the Philippines needs to address if it intends to be eligible for support under the TFFF. It needs to ensure a robust national forest monitoring system, which the Philippines is lacking in several aspects of implementation,” said John Leo Algo, national coordinator of Aksyon Klima Pilipinas, a non-profit network of 40 civil society organisations.
While the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) is exploring ways to address this by using remote sensing technology for detecting illegal logging, factors such as a lack of resources and manpower, outdated policies, and widespread illegal deforestation will make the Philippines less likely to access support under the TFFF, said Algo.
Toerris Jaeger, diirector of Rainforest Foundation Norway, said in a press briefing that countries will become eligible to access the fund by reducing deforestation, based on their pledges. The Philippines, along with Indonesia were some of the Southeast nations that committed to reversing and ending deforestation by 2030 in COP26. But it is just Indonesia and Malaysia so far from Southeast Asia who have joined the TFFF.
“That [commitment] means that we need the financing mechanism to kick in or to continue post-2030 when deforestation we hope has eventually ended. It requires political will on the domestic side to actually end deforestation and showcase that through a decrease in deforestation rates,” said Jaeger.
All sources of funding needed
The Philippines should do what it can to access the TFFF, given that there is a global US$700 billion annual financing gap for nature, suggested Wilson John Barbon, country executive director of nonprofit Conservation International Philippines,
Nature-based solutions receive only 3 per cent of climate finance worldwide, despite offering up to 30 per cent of the mitigation in emissions needed by 2030.
“We need all sources of financing to meet global climate and biodiversity goals. The scale and urgency of the climate, nature and biodiversity crises demand a significant increase in funding from all available sources — public, private, philanthropic, and innovative mechanisms,” Barbon told Eco-Business.
He said that his organisation will continue to engage government and other stakeholders to ensure the inclusion of nature targets, using the goal of TFFF as potential financing pathway to realise targets for forest conservation and sustainable management.
On the monitoring side, he said the Philippines has the minimum national technical capacity and globally-available forest monitoring systems that can meet the requirementrs of TFFF.
Monitoring, including the setting up of baselines for degradation and deforestation, will rely on satellite-based systems that can either be nationally-generated or globally available forest data such as the Global Forest Watch. The TFFF will have defined standards and these satellite-based data systems should comply with these defined standards, he added.
