One of the central issues on the agenda for the upcoming COP30 in Belém, Brazil, will be the protection and restoration of rainforests, given their crucial role in absorbing carbon and slowing global warming. With Brazil holding more than 60% of the Amazon, the world’s largest tropical forest, the climate conference will provide a fitting setting for discussions on how best to safeguard these vital ecosystems.

Dalberg recently partnered with a leading global philanthropy working on rainforest protection across the Amazon, the Congo basin, and Indonesia. From this engagement, we identified four strategic imperatives that can help elevate donors’ agendas when funding forest protection initiatives.

Foster Funder and NGO Alliances to Unlock Impact

For philanthropies to maximize the impact of their funding, collaboration with other funders is essential, especially in forest protection. While rainforest protection has gained traction in recent years, with multiple governments, private entities, and philanthropies pledging significant resources, the scale of the challenge remains daunting: a USD 460 billion annual funding gap to protect, restore, and enhance forests globally[1].

Funder alliances that align resources and strategies can address systemic deforestation drivers and scale restoration, particularly when funders have different but complementary priorities. Beyond coordinating grant-making, alliances can help funders maximize their influence through collective action, build market-making signals that encourage virtuous behaviors, distribute risks to encourage innovation, and promote data and learning frameworks that help foster partnerships and track efforts across geographies.

Recent alliances such as the Climate and Land Use Alliance (CLUA) and the Forests, People, Climate (FPC) initiative illustrate the power of collective funding approaches. For instance, FPC has secured USD 780 million—one of the largest recent pledges to protect forests globally—from 13 philanthropies working toward shared goals. In addition, FPC could also engage 600 experts to co-develop strategies to protect the world’s major forest basins, helping funders coalesce efforts around a common framework [2].

Build Ecosystems to Address the Multifaceted Nature of Forest Protection

Forest protection is inherently multifaceted. Multiple and at times conflicting goals must be managed, such as protecting Indigenous peoples and traditional communities’ land rights, encouraging the development of sustainable supply chains, reducing illicit activities, providing living wages to farmers and traditional communities, and promoting forest-positive businesses. No single strategy or grant can effectively address all these challenges; yet we cannot design programs in isolation. Additionally, some of the organizations with the highest potential for impact on the ground may lack the tools and capabilities to engage with the donors that could support their work. An ecosystem approach can help resolve some of these tensions.

Fundamentally, building ecosystems means supporting different organizations with complementary strengths and often varying levels of capacity over the long term. For instance, in the Brazilian Amazon, Belterra and Re.green are two innovative businesses working to restore forests and attracting dozens of millions of dollars in funding from commercial or near-commercial funders, like the Brazil Climate Fund [3]. Yet, their growth took years of exploring different approaches, sustained by catalytic funding that provided an early lifeline [4].

Taking risks on grassroot organizations, including through flexible or core funding over longer time periods, can allow new initiatives to flourish. Philanthropy has a unique ability to support promising organizations as well as connect them with technical knowledge, collaboration opportunities, and networks that can help them grow.

Center Strategies on Indigenous and Traditional Communities

Forest protection goes hand in hand with the rights of Indigenous peoples and traditional communities who live in, care for, and protect forests. Their presence is often the first line of defense against deforestation driven by mining, cattle farming, or monocultures such as soy or palm oil. Yet these communities are often disempowered by restoration and conservation efforts.

Effective initiatives therefore adopt a people–climate–nature approach, recognizing that the three are deeply interconnected. Programs that secure land rights, enable forest-positive livelihoods, and draw upon communities’ traditional knowledge tend to be the most impactful and sustainable. One powerful example is Strong Roots in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since 2009, the organization has worked in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park, the Itombwe Nature Reserve, and the ecological corridor linking both areas. Strong Roots identifies challenges faced by Indigenous peoples and local communities and supports them to thrive while protecting forests and wildlife. Its approach includes securing additional land between protected areas, ensuring that communities govern these lands, and working with the government to provide the legal basis for their governance.

Investing in communities’ forest-positive livelihoods ensures that conservation aligns with economic resilience; it can help promote and support communities’ deep ecological knowledge and strengthen the effectiveness and legitimacy of conservation efforts. These programs take time, resources, and long-term commitment to succeed and enable communities to become sustainable.

Build Collectively Owned Strategies with Narratives that Emphasize the Collective Benefits of Protecting Forests

Many stakeholders, including smallholder farmers and traditional communities in many regions need to work together to protect and restore forests. Climate mitigation narratives often fail when they are not designed by local stakeholders (traditional communities, smallholder farmers, etc.) in a way that takes into account their own priorities such as living incomes or protecting local traditions and habitats. Global and systemic challenges can be addressed more effectively with strategies that are collectively owned [5]. In Indonesia, for example, the startup Fairventures fostered collaboration between environmental NGOs and smallholder farmer cooperatives who designed joint agroforestry solutions, resulting in over 3,800 hectares of reforested areas while supporting over 8,000 farmers.

To reach stakeholders beyond the ecosystem, narratives also need to be adjusted to highlight the economic advantages of forest protection. For instance, in the Brazilian Amazon, programs reframing deforestation as an economic risk created narratives that resonated with local business leaders and policymakers beyond the traditional “green” community and ensured their support.

Philanthropy Remains a Critical Enabler

Philanthropy has been very successful in advancing conservation and reforestation. Funders have held a leading role in helping reverse the trend on deforestation by strengthening regulatory frameworks and their enforcement; building more transparent supply chains, including by investing in digital traceability tools to create accountability; or supporting new, commercially viable forest-positive business models.

Many key opportunities remain. First, continuing to support transparency, seed business models, and protect land rights can build foundational ecosystems that enable future solutions to emerge and thrive. Second, supporting the creation of locally driven, collectively owned sustainability roadmaps and connecting transition actors to innovative financing mechanisms to execute these roadmaps will be critical to bring these solutions to scale. Finally, supporting the growth of forest-positive business models, for instance by advancing demand commitments for sustainable products or encouraging sustainable purchasing in public procurement contracts such as school meal programs, can help create sustainable approaches.

Philanthropy remains a critical actor in the saving of our forests and their traditional communities. More funding is urgently needed but the good news is that a robust ecosystem of partners and coordinators already exists to help funders decide when and where to best engage.

[1] Forest Declaration Assessment, Forest finance: Theme 3 Assessment (2022)

[2] Forests People Climate, $400M in New Philanthropic Commitments to Tropical Forests and Communities to Combat Climate Change (2022)

[3] Re.green, Re.green secures R$ 80 million from Brazil’s Climate Fund (2025)

[4] Belterra, Original CRA brings credit to bioeconomy and forest restoration (2023)

[5] https://ssir.org/articles/entry/collectively-owned-strategies