Photo credit: pangamedia/Adobe Stock
Every minute of every day, 11 football fields of ancient, irreplaceable forest disappear. In 2025 alone, the world lost 4.3 million hectares of tropical primary forest — an area the size of Denmark. While that figure represented a 36 percent reduction from the record-shattering losses of the previous year, the current rate of primary forest loss remains 46 percent higher than it was a decade ago. The world is still far from the trajectory needed to halt and reverse forest loss by 2030.
These were the opening numbers at a side event convened by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) on the margins of the 21st session of the UN Forum on Forests (UNFF21), moderated by Pascal Martinez, with participation from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Forest & Climate Leaders' Partnership (FCLP), the Global Forest Financing Facilitation Network (GFFFN), and the governments of Brazil, Thailand, and Ghana. The session brought together finance architects, government representatives, and conservation leaders to address the single most persistent barrier to protecting what remains of the world's primary forests: the chronic gap between ambition and finance.
Primary forests are not simply trees. Covering around a quarter of the world's forests, they store vast amounts of carbon, shelter approximately 80 percent of all land-based species, and regulate rainfall across entire continents — planetary life-support systems that, once lost, cannot be recovered within any human-relevant timeframe. The scientific consensus is unequivocal: you cannot plant your way out of losing a primary forest. A restored forest will not be, for centuries, the ecological equivalent of an ancient one. As GEF Interim CEO Claude Gascon warned delegates, the tipping points are already approaching: scientists estimate that the Amazon risks irreversible dieback if forest cover falls below 75 percent — and parts of the eastern Amazon have already crossed that threshold.
The financing gap is stark. Meeting the 2030 objectives would require approximately $300 billion per year — against current annual investment of around $84 billion. The FCLP's Forest Finance Roadmap for Action identifies six concrete solutions to bridge the gap. The arithmetic, argued Emelyne Cheney, Director of the FCLP Secretariat, is hard to dismiss: forests require around one percent of global climate mitigation finance yet can deliver roughly 20 percent of the solution. "Sixty-seven billion dollars," she noted, citing the annual investment needed for tropical forests alone, "is less than the world spends on ice cream every year."
Gascon grounded the case in three decades of GEF evidence. Under the current GEF-8 cycle, approximately $1.8 billion in forest grants has been deployed, leveraging over $15 billion in co-financing across 243 projects in 110 countries. Its flagship Amazon, Congo, and Other Critical Forest Biomes Integrated Program has mobilized $293 million in grants, unlocking $1.4 billion across 27 countries. With GEF-9 now replenished at an initial $3.9 billion, these programs will continue with greater ambition through 2030. "The data tells us two things simultaneously," Gascon told delegates. "The crisis is real, urgent, and worsening. And action works — when countries are supported and empowered, forests can be saved."
The second half of the session heard from government representatives from Ghana, Thailand, and Brazil on the gap between global mechanisms and on-the-ground reality. Common themes emerged: fragmented mechanisms with incompatible safeguard systems, funding cycles mismatched to conservation's long time horizons, and reporting burdens that consume technical resources otherwise deployable for conservation. Ghana's Charles Sarpong-Dua noted that patient investment in national readiness systems is foundational. "This readiness process has been critical to building national ownership," he observed. Garo Batmanian, the Director General of the Brazilian Forest Service posed the sharpest structural challenge — would ARPA, one of the most effective Amazon conservation programs ever designed, pass today's multilateral approval requirements? "We need to speak the language of our audience," he argued. "We haven't made the case effectively enough that investing in watershed protection is just as necessary for food production as agricultural subsidies."
UNFF Deputy Director Minoru Takada closed with a reminder of what brings this community back each year. "Change happens through partnerships," he said, "and this is a community that needs to grow." The side event produced no new financial pledge — but something arguably more durable: a clearer shared diagnosis of why the current architecture falls short. Mechanisms operating in parallel. Finance arriving in fragments. Countries left to navigate a labyrinth alone. The GEF, with its mandate spanning climate, biodiversity, and land degradation and its incoming ninth replenishment resources, stands as one of the few actors capable of driving the operational coordination the crisis demands. The window is narrow — but it remains open.
