Countries meeting at COP30 in Belém, Brazil on November 6 announced three global commitments to strengthen land rights and finance for Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendants and local communities, pledging $1.8 billion for forest and land tenure through 2030, a plan to legally recognize 160 million hectares of community land, and a major blended-finance facility that requires at least 20 percent of payments to go directly to forest communities. Those announcements aim to link legal recognition and money to the people who manage forests.
The pledges address a longstanding fault line in forest governance: communities that protect forests rarely hold formal titles and therefore struggle to access climate and conservation finance. The evidence presented at the summit is stark. Lands stewarded by Indigenous Peoples and local communities experience deforestation rates up to 26 percent lower than the global average, and those communities hold more than half of the planet’s intact forest.
However, roughly 1.3 billion hectares of traditional lands remain without legal recognition. That gap translates into blocked funding, unresolved land claims and continued pressure from logging, agricultural expansion and extractive industries.
The renewed Forest and Land Tenure pledge and the Intergovernmental Land Tenure Commitment are significant on paper. Securing 160 million hectares would equal a major land-rights transfer in scale and, if implemented well, would change who negotiates resource use at national and local levels. But the mechanics matter. Past experience shows that promises routed through national agencies or complex financing vehicles often fail to reach community organizations.
At COP26, analysis found that only about 10 percent of a previous $1.7 billion tenure pledge reached Indigenous and community-led organizations. That mismatch between pledge and delivery is the core problem the new commitments must overcome.
Looking to practical examples in Africa highlights both opportunity and caution. The Democratic Republic of Congo has moved to grant community forest concessions, with more than 166 concessions covering over three million hectares authorized since early 2024. Independent assessments indicate these concessions register substantially lower deforestation rates than surrounding areas. Such outcomes suggest that devolved management, when combined with legal instruments and technical support, can convert stewardship into a defensible, financed activity.
However, scaling that model across countries with weaker administrative systems will require sustained investment in mapping, dispute resolution and local governance.
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The Tropical Forest Forever Facility proposes to mobilize public, philanthropic and private capital at scale to pay forest countries for maintaining standing forests, and its requirement that 20 percent of payments go to Indigenous Peoples and local communities marks a policy shift. Yet the fund’s structure poses design risks: if payments are channeled through national treasuries or intermediaries without unambiguous pathways for direct community access, the intended beneficiaries may remain sidelined.
Practical safeguards, simplified contracting, direct-transfer mechanisms, and community-level fiduciary arrangements, are essential to ensure funds reach local custodians rather than being absorbed into central budgets.
Operational barriers are not only financial. Formal land titling processes are slow, expensive and often exclude customary systems that communities rely on. Recognizing customary tenure, municipal certificates and community-conserved area registrations as legitimate interim evidence can speed access to funding and protection. Payment-for-ecosystem-services programs and donor mechanisms that accept alternative documentation have shown results in other regions; adapting that flexibility to African legal contexts could unlock near-term resources while longer-term formalization proceeds.
Equity must also be central. Women, youth and marginalized ethnic groups typically shoulder the labor of managing forests and fetching water, yet they are often underrepresented in tenure negotiations and governance arrangements. Ensuring that finance flows to community organizations requires explicit measures that prioritize inclusive governance and allow local groups to control timing, modality and use of funds.
For African governments and civil society, National authorities should translate the global commitments into clear national targets and timelines, adopt interim recognition mechanisms that validate customary stewardship, and fund the mapping, registries and adjudication systems that make community tenure verifiable. Donors should prioritize grant-based instruments and highly concessional financing accessible to community organizations without imposing commercial bankability criteria. Monitoring frameworks must be disaggregated and transparent so that progress is visible and accountability can follow.
The political window created by COP30 is narrow. The $1.8 billion pledge runs to 2030 and the land-tenure target requires near-term legislative momentum. That creates an operational yardstick: if governments and funders design delivery mechanisms that reach communities, Belém’s commitments can mark a turning pointyg7. If mechanisms favor centralized channels or impose burdensome conditions, the commitments will add to a pattern of pledged ambition without changed practice.
The test is concrete for Africa; secure forests will follow only when the people who live on and steward those lands have the legal recognition and direct finance needed to defend and manage them.
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