Skip to main content
    Rainforests

    Rainforests: Keep the world's rainforests standing, with the people who live in them.

    The tropics lost 4.3 million hectares of primary forest in 2025. Some of the best protection costs little: in the Amazon, forests held by Indigenous peoples lose far less than similar forests nearby.

    Try it in the sliderTalk to Ryan

    Ryan K. Hertel · heyitskenton

    The problem

    What we're up against.

    • Still disappearing.

      The tropics lost 4.3 million hectares of primary forest in 2025, down 36% from the year before, but still 70% above the path to halting forest loss by 2030.

    • The carbon at stake.

      Losing tropical primary forest in 2024 released 3.1 gigatons of greenhouse gases.

    • Farms drive most of it.

      Agriculture drove 90% to 99% of deforestation across the tropics from 2011 to 2015.

    • Home to most land vertebrates.

      Tropical forests are home to 62% of the world's land vertebrate species.

    What works

    Proven, and ready to grow.

    • What the evidence says.

      Across 320 studies, protected areas, enforced forest laws and payments for keeping forest were all linked to less deforestation.

    • Paying to keep trees.

      In a randomized trial in 121 villages in Uganda, tree cover fell 4.2% where forest owners were offered payments, against 9.1% where they weren't.

    • Land rights protect forests.

      In Peru, giving Indigenous communities title to their land cut clearing by more than three quarters in the two years around titling.

    • Full rights matter.

      In Brazil, Indigenous territories with full property rights saw significantly less deforestation. Territories without full rights saw no effect.

    • Protected areas help.

      Across the world's protected areas, deforestation was about 41% lower than it would have been, though not zero.

    What a family could fund

    Where the money goes furthest.

    • A fund built to take philanthropy.

      Brazil's new Tropical Forest Forever Facility has a target of $125 billion and aims to raise $10 billion at first, from governments and philanthropies. It plans to pay forest countries up to $4 a hectare a year, with at least 20% going to Indigenous peoples and local communities.

    • Land titles are cheap.

      Titling a hectare of Indigenous land costs about $6 in Colombia and $45 in Bolivia, by the UN's food agency.

    • Room for land-rights funding.

      By its advocates' count, funding for community land rights is $2.9 billion short of what it needs to scale up, and it's less than 1% of climate aid and philanthropy.

    • Parks run short.

      Brazil's federal protected areas in the Amazon ran funding deficits averaging 79.2% of their minimum management costs.

    • Protection, by the acre.

      Rainforest Trust lists a cost of $2,327,744 for one project at the edge of the Bolivian Amazon covering 2,259,968 acres: about $1.03 an acre to get the land protected, our arithmetic from its own figures.

    Honest limits

    What money can't promise.

    • Carbon credits often overclaim.

      In a review of rigorous studies, only about 25% of credits for avoided deforestation matched real reductions. Most forest offset projects studied hadn't significantly reduced deforestation.

    • Deforestation can move.

      For Brazil's zero-deforestation soy policies, clearing that moved elsewhere in Brazil canceled 43% to 50% of the gains, by one model.

    • Titles aren't always enough.

      One study of Brazil's formal recognition of Indigenous lands found no effect on forest cover, and a later one found a real but small effect.

    • Fire can undo protection.

      Fires can do serious damage, and forests don't always recover.

    • Governance decides.

      In Indonesia, more political districts meant more deforestation, and no outside money can stand in for a country's own rules and enforcement.

    Hard questions

    Asked and answered.

    1. You might ask

      Aren't forest carbon credits a scam?

      Ryan

      Many have been badly overstated: only about 25% of avoided-deforestation credits matched real reductions. So this plan buys no offsets. It funds land rights, management and monitoring directly, and judges them by the forest that's still standing.

    2. You might ask

      Isn't it for each country to decide about its own forests?

      Ryan

      Yes. The strongest evidence backs the rights of the people who already live in these forests, and the new forest fund leaves it to forest countries to decide how its payments are spent. When a country resolves to govern its forests better, forest loss can fall quickly.

    3. You might ask

      Won't deforestation just move?

      Ryan

      Sometimes, in part. But in the Uganda trial, people paid to keep their trees didn't shift their clearing to nearby land.

    In the slider

    See what your fortune could do here.

    Rainforests

    The slider prices this cause with these numbers:

    • Keeping tropical forest under funded protection costs up to about $8.00 a hectare a year: our arithmetic from a costing for the Brazilian Amazon.
    • The whole need here is the tropical forest in the countries a new global forest fund would support, over 1 billion hectares.
    • A protected hectare isn't always a saved one: protected areas cut deforestation by about 41%, not to zero.
    Try it in the sliderTalk to Ryan

    More of the Blueprint

    Keep reading.

    23 more chapters on the way

    Back to Keep 100

    Sources

    Every number in this chapter, and where it came from.

    1. Source 1: Tropical Rainforest Loss Slowed in 2025, but Fire is a Growing Threat to Forests Worldwide (opens in a new tab)

      World Resources Institute, 29 April 2026. Checked 16 October 2026.

      WRI's Global Forest Review, from University of Maryland satellite data.

    2. Source 2: New UN report shows evidence that Indigenous and Tribal Peoples are the best guardians of the forests of Latin America and the Caribbean (opens in a new tab)

      Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 25 March 2021. Checked 16 October 2026.

      On a review of more than 300 studies by the FAO and FILAC.

    3. Source 3: How much forest was lost in 2024? (opens in a new tab)

      World Resources Institute, 21 May 2025. Checked 16 October 2026.

    4. Source 4: Disentangling the numbers behind agriculture-driven tropical deforestation (Pendrill and others) (opens in a new tab)

      Science, 9 September 2022. Checked 16 October 2026.

    5. Source 5: Tropical forests are home to over half of the world's vertebrate species (Pillay and others) (opens in a new tab)

      Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 7 October 2021. Checked 16 October 2026.

    6. Source 6: What Drives and Stops Deforestation, Reforestation, and Forest Degradation? An Updated Meta-analysis (Busch and Ferretti-Gallon) (opens in a new tab)

      Conservation International, 15 August 2023. Checked 16 October 2026.

      A summary of the meta-analysis, published in the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy.

    7. Source 7: Cash for carbon: A randomized trial of payments for ecosystem services to reduce deforestation (Jayachandran and others) (opens in a new tab)

      Science, July 2017. Checked 16 October 2026.

    8. Source 8: Titling indigenous communities protects forests in the Peruvian Amazon (Blackman and others) (opens in a new tab)

      Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 3 April 2017. Checked 16 October 2026.

    9. Source 9: Collective property rights reduce deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon (Baragwanath and Bayi) (opens in a new tab)

      Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 11 August 2020. Checked 16 October 2026.

    10. Source 10: A forest loss report card for the world's protected areas (Wolf and others) (opens in a new tab)

      Nature Ecology & Evolution, 11 February 2021. Checked 16 October 2026.

    11. Source 11: Statement: Brazil Launches Tropical Forests Forever Facility (opens in a new tab)

      World Resources Institute, 6 November 2025. Checked 16 October 2026.

    12. Source 12: TFFF FAQs (opens in a new tab)

      Tropical Forest Forever Facility, 23 June 2026. Checked 16 October 2026.

      The fund's own account.

    13. Source 13: As COP30 Approaches, Progress in Funding for Indigenous and Local Communities Threatened by Global Aid Cuts (opens in a new tab)

      Rights and Resources Initiative, 23 September 2025. Checked 16 October 2026.

      From advocates for community land rights, with Rainforest Foundation Norway.

    14. Source 14: Chronic underfunding of protected areas in a megadiverse country: spatial, temporal and socioeconomic patterns from Brazil (Cunha and others) (opens in a new tab)

      Environmental Conservation, 15 May 2026. Checked 16 October 2026.

      Funding for Brazil's federal protected areas from 2014 to 2023.

    15. Source 15: Stopping Deforestation at the Edge of the Bolivian Amazon (opens in a new tab)

      Rainforest Trust. Checked 16 October 2026.

      The organization's own figures, for getting the land designated as protected. Managing it comes on top.

    16. Source 16: Systematic assessment of the achieved emission reductions of carbon crediting projects (Probst and others) (opens in a new tab)

      Nature Communications, 14 November 2024. Checked 16 October 2026.

      A synthesis of rigorous studies covering more than two thousand projects.

    17. Source 17: Action needed to make carbon offsets from forest conservation work for climate change mitigation (West and others) (opens in a new tab)

      Science, 24 August 2023. Checked 16 October 2026.

    18. Source 18: Leakage does not fully offset soy supply-chain efforts to reduce deforestation in Brazil (Villoria and others) (opens in a new tab)

      Nature Communications, 17 September 2022. Checked 16 October 2026.

      An economic model, not a measurement.

    19. Source 19: Indigenous land rights and deforestation: Evidence from the Brazilian Amazon (BenYishay and others) (opens in a new tab)

      AidData, 1 November 2017. Checked 16 October 2026.

      Published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.

    20. Source 20: Formal designation of Brazilian indigenous lands linked to small but consistent reductions in deforestation (West) (opens in a new tab)

      Ecological Economics, April 2024. Checked 16 October 2026.

    21. Source 21: The Political Economy of Deforestation in the Tropics (Burgess and others) (opens in a new tab)

      Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 2012. Checked 16 October 2026.

      Satellite data for Indonesia.

    22. Source 22: Protecting Brazil's Amazon could be a bargain, if the government were willing to pay (opens in a new tab)

      Mongabay, 4 July 2022. Checked 16 October 2026.

      Reporting a peer-reviewed costing (da Silva and others, Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation, 2022) of the yearly cost of managing the Amazon's protected areas and Indigenous lands.

    23. Source 23: Tropical Forest Forever Facility (opens in a new tab)

      Tropical Forest Forever Facility. Checked 16 October 2026.

      The fund's own figure for the forest countries it could support.