Climate Justice & Forests
The world is on track to well exceed 1.5°C of warming, threatening devastating impacts. Forests—critical to climate stability and biodiversity protection—are being lost rapidly, all the while false solutions like carbon offsets, bioenergy, and tree plantations dominate climate policy. These market-based schemes often violate the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
Our Forests and Climate Campaign challenges corporate influence over forest and climate policy, exposing harmful practices and advocating for real, rights-based alternatives. We support community-led, gender-responsive solutions and connect local struggles with global advocacy to promote climate justice and protect forests.
Exposing false solutions to the climate and biodiversity crises
- Biomass energy: Biomass energy is increasingly being relied on to meet renewable energy targets and replace fossil fuels, which has huge implications for forests and the expansion of tree plantations. In collaboration with member groups and allies in the Biomass Action Network, we coordinate three regional working groups in the Global South in order to support struggles and build campaigns against big biomass developments.
- Carbon markets and forest offsets: Climate mitigation approaches centred around afforestation and reforestation with tree plantations, forest carbon offsets and other market-based schemes have been repeatedly shown to be ineffective ways of reducing emissions. We support the work of the Climate, Land, Ambition, Rights Alliance (CLARA) and networks such as the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice (DCJ) to expose false solutions such as emissions offsetting.
- Land-based geoengineering: Removing carbon from the atmosphere through so-called Carbon Dioxide Removal schemes like Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) and biochar are increasingly being relied on and promoted as another excuse to avoid drastic emissions reductions and to normalise the idea that global carbon budgets will be overshot by a considerable margin due to a lack of political will. Together with our allies in the Hands Off Mother Earth (HOME) Alliance and Geoengineering Monitor we work to expose false claims made about CDR and keep these schemes out of multilateral mitigation efforts.
- Climate finance: Public subsidies and climate finance are increasingly being directed towards commercial tree plantations, bioenergy generation and other false solutions, with strong private sector involvement. The new threat of the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF) will lock-in a dependence on private finance to meet climate finance targets. Along with the ETI campaign, we lead civil society opposition to TFFF, and campaign for climate finance mechanisms —such as the Green Climate Fund—to fund real, community-led solutions.
Supporting real solutions
- Overcoming the challenges that communities face in protecting and conserving their forests: Enhancing and protecting terrestrial ecosystems and natural sinks through better land governance and management and transformative agricultural practices through the stewardship of Indigenous Peoples, local communities and women in all their diversity represents a far more equitable and cost-effective way of addressing the climate crisis than the false solutions that so often receive all of the focus and finance.
- Building a policy framework for rights-based, gender-just and non-market approaches to climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation: Gender transformative rights-based approaches to mitigating the climate crisis have so far received little attention from policy-makers, who are largely informed by modeling designed for combustion-based economies and land sector emissions and removals. Policymakers must therefore be offered pathways that strengthen tenure and land access rights and that are gender transformative and socially just, both as effective climate solutions and as a means of addressing social injustices and building resilience.
- Redirecting climate finance for false solutions and perverse incentives for forest destruction towards real solutions: While trillions of dollars flows into financing false solutions and carbon trading, real solutions such as ensuring the tenure rights of Indigenous People and local communities and strengthening their forest protection practices have received little funding from the international community. Divestment from false solutions and a redirection of resources to real solutions would be of great benefit from a climate perspective, and free up public resources for social welfare systems such as health and education.
These core areas of work tie together the vital struggles that our member groups are engaged in locally and nationally, with international-level advocacy that we undertake as a coalition alongside our allies.
We see social and gender justice as being key pillars of climate justice, and carry out our work through an intersectional lens based on internationalist and anti-capitalist principles, and in solidarity with those on the front lines of the climate and biodiversity crises.
Exploited Lands, Exploited Lives: Struggles for Forests, Life, and Gender Justice in the Global South
In this issue of Forest Cover, our member groups share powerful research and testimonies from Brazil, Bolivia, China, Georgia, Indonesia, Nepal, and Paraguay. Together, we expose the violence of monoculture plantations, mining, and land grabs—and uplift the real solutions led by Indigenous Peoples, women, and local communities.
Decarbonisation or Dispossession? Industrial-Scale Biomass in Latin America and Its Impacts
[portugues abajxo] As COP30 convenes in Brazil, governments and corporations are spotlighting biomass as a key part of the “green transition,” promoting it under national decarbonisation and bioeconomy agendas. The Belem X4 pledge, for example, aims to quadruple...
Exploited Lands, Exploited Lives: Struggles for Forests, Life, and Gender Justice in the Global South
Forests are complex living ecosystems—homes, sources of livelihoods, and foundations of life. Yet across the world, they are devastated by extractive industries, agribusiness, and corporate greenwashing disguised as “climate solutions.” Who suffers most? The South,...
Tropical Forest Fund Fails its First Test as Belém Climate Conference Begins
No More Green Capitalism, Say Indigenous and Civil Society Groups November 7, 2025, Belém – A World Bank-managed mechanism to finance forest protection called the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) fell far short of the money it promised to raise upon its launch...
