Welcome to another edition of Climatebase Weekly. In today’s edition…

🌎 This Week In Climate: An analysis of the outcomes of COP30.

🌟 Featured climate jobs at 15+ new employers — Scroll down to view them all.

🚀 Fellowship Wins: Recent achievements from our Fellowship community.

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Our Fellows continue to make big moves in climate — here are some of the latest career wins from the Climatebase Fellowship community. Want to join the community? Apply to the next cohort of the Fellowship and learn more here.

Want to join the community? Apply to the next cohort of the Fellowship and learn more here.

By Julian Moore & Abigail Bassett

Two years ago, negotiators at COP28 in Dubai reached what, at the time, seemed like a milestone they would never turn back from. For the first time in its history, the Conference’s final agreement made a direct link between fossil fuels and climate change. The agreement was hailed by UN Climate Change’s own Executive Secretary Simon Stiell as “the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era”. 

A full 65 years after Charles Keeling began monitoring atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa Observatory, world leaders had finally caught up with the most basic facts of climate change, and the payoff for decades of painful negotiations appeared to be in sight. 

Those high hopes of meeting a low bar lasted two years. When the final agreement from COP30 was released on Saturday, serial climate obstructer nations, led by Saudi Arabia, had succeeded in dropping any mention of fossil fuels. Negotiators landed instead on the more palatable mention of a “Dubai consensus”, an oblique reference to the COP28 outcome that made any connection to fossil fuels impossible to discern for anyone not steeped in the jargon of UN declarations.

In the days since, activists and researchers have echoed their disappointment and frustration with the results. The search for solutions, and possibly alternatives, to the COP process have come to the fore of climate discourse again. 

One long-standing criticism from outside observers of COP that rose to a murmur inside the conference this year is that the process is simply too large. Fossil fuels are vital to the economies of some countries, while their continued use represents an existential threat to others. Trying to fit the interests of two diametrically opposed camps in an organization that gives equal weight to all nations (the so-called “one country, one vote” principle) has played an outsized role in the middle-of-the-road compromises that satisfy neither side, and do too little to stop rising emissions. 

One alternative has emerged from Belem: the Netherlands and Colombia announced they will co-host the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels. As the name suggests, this conference will make no bones about its objective to bring an end to the fossil fuel era. 

The conference, planned for April 2026, is in keeping with larger trends in international climate politics. This year saw the second Africa Climate Summit in Ethiopia, another attempt at regional multilateral action with smaller, but more focused (and hopefully more achievable) ambitions. 

So while this year’s global climate conference may have kicked the issue of carbon emissions down the road, as Abigail Basset reports, another concrete win took shape for the rainforests in Belemand across the world: the Tropical Forests Forever Facility. 

Last week at COP30 in Brazil, tropical forests took center stage, both in policy hopes and sharp critiques. 

Tropical forests are powerhouses of the planet, sequestering vast amounts of carbon through their ecological processes, helping to purify the air and stabilise the climate. But those forests have been lost at an alarming rate thanks to unrelenting deforestation in countries like Brazil. 

According to this year’s UN Global Deforestation report, the world has lost nearly 490 million hectares of forest since 1990, and approximately 88% of that loss has occurred in the tropics. While deforestation, or the clearing of forests for agriculture or for timber, has slowed in the global south (particularly South America), the sheer scale of forest loss remains one of the most serious challenges in the effort to address climate change. 

At COP30, the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF) fund was launched with the aim of slowing this loss further by financially rewarding tropical-forest countries for maintaining their forests rather than just penalizing deforestation, raising both hopes and concerns in the global community.

The TFFF is essentially a fund that gives wealthy countries an avenue to buy up tropical forest land so it isn't cut down, offering a more direct approach than forest carbon credits, which are tradeable assets that represent the reduction or removal of one metric ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through activities like reforestation, forest preservation, or improved forest management. 

Under the TFFFs “payment-for-performance” model, eligible countries receive annual payments so long as they keep deforestation rates below a specified threshold (0.5% per year) and reduce forest degradation as measured by satellites. The TFFF, led by Brazil and managed by the World Bank, aims to mobilize approximately $125 billion: roughly $25 billion in borrowing, plus $100 billion from private investors, philanthropic giving, and corporate sponsors. A key feature of the TFFF is that at least 20% of payments must be directed to Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) for stewardship. The majority of the fund will be invested (as WRI points out) in “fixed income emerging markets and other sovereign and corporate bonds (excluding fossil fuels and other environmentally destructive sectors), which would earn a higher return.”

The intent is to “flip the economics” of deforestation. Instead of treating forests as liabilities, the TFFF treats them as assets whose standing (intact) generates value, creating incentives for conservation over clearing. 

The TFFF has received mixed responses on its launch. For one, it offers one of the most ambitious attempts to realign the economics of conservation by directing large, predictable payments to tropical forest countries that keep deforestation low. Analysts at the World Resources Institute say the model could finally make standing forests more valuable than clearing them, and its endowment structure aims to reduce the volatility that has undermined past climate finance efforts like those in carbon credits, for example. 

At the same time, risks remain. Bloomberg has reported that early commitments fall far short of the $125 billion needed, raising concerns about whether payouts will be both large enough and reliable enough to shift national incentives, and Indigenous activists say it doesn’t go far enough to protect valuable tropical forest land. 

While the TFFF may be a step change in global forest finance, it will only make a real difference if the money materializes and the people who safeguard these forests are meaningfully empowered. Whether it becomes a breakthrough or another unrealized promise now hinges on what happens after COP30.

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TMRW

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Meter

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Futurebuilt Group Pty Ltd

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Verifi

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Latitude Media

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Perennial

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