Bulletin 277 - december 2025

The government of the Brazilian state of Pará – host of the COP30 climate conference – introduced an annual “Week of Awareness on the Importance of Carbon Credits”, the Indonesian government sets up a “Seller meets buyer” sales booth for carbon credits at the COP. These are the more visible signs of climate talks that are more concerned about creating business opportunities than halting the climate crisis.

The Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) is hailed as big new idea to finance forest protection. Launch during the UN climate conference in the Amazon city Belém, hundreds of organizations across the Global South have rejected it as another idea that reinforces capitalist-colonialist oppression and exploits the debt burden of the Global South.

“We know these projects are not truly green. When turbines come, birds will vanish. When mines come, dust will cover schools and homes. When forests are seized in the name of the government’s ‘forest reclamation policy’, the poor lose everything”, explains a Kham Pa Lai community grassroots organization that is resisting extractive industry projects.

Costa Rica presents itself as a global pioneer in implementing Jurisdictional REDD+, and it advertises this as a success. However, indigenous communities denounce coercion on the part of the state, which makes acceptance of this initiative a condition for it to invest in health or education. In this article, a member of the Bribri people talks about their struggle.

Tired of living surrounded by eucalyptus trees, communities from the provinces of Zambézia, Manica and Nampula are raising their voices against the occupation of land by companies such as Portucel Mozambique – which has prevented these communities from farming, accessing water, and living a dignified life. They are now demanding the return of their land and respect for their rights.

More than 50 organizations, movements and communities from around the world have come together to endorse the Declaration of Women Against REDD and Carbon Markets.

The annual UN climate conference “has in fact become a negotiation more concerned with how much money each country thinks it might save or grab in the short term than about finding true solutions to a real problem”. The observation from the WRM bulletin editorial “Our Expectations for the Climate Change Convention's COP6” feels strikingly relevant 25 years on.

The article, COP: 30 Years of Disillusionment, stands out among the thousands of pages written about the UN Climate Change Conference. It analyzes the danger posed by the COP apparatus itself, which prevents movements from imagining and fighting for systemic transformation. “Our task is not to reform the COP. Our task is to outgrow it – to build something that cannot be contained. To redirect our resources away from convention halls and toward struggles on the ground. To trust not in the promises of politicians but in the power of people,” says the organization, A Growing Culture, which authored the article.

A recent report on the transnational corporation SOCFIN – owned by the French group Bollore and the Hubert Fabri family of Luxembourg – exposes the sexual violence, expulsions of local populations, and the contamination suffered by communities living around rubber and oil palm plantations. Socfin is an agri-food company with operations in 10 countries in the Global South. It controls approximately 380,000 hectares of land where it grows oil palm and rubber trees on an industrial scale. The report reveals that allegations of sexual abuse and other violations of communities' rights, coupled with the contamination caused by the plantations, are not isolated events, but rather a pattern that has been systematically repeated in at least 15 plantations located in different countries.

“This manifesto is our roadmap in this decisive moment, the pulse of collective action, a call for profound systemic transformation.” With these words, La Via Campesina calls for people to read the demands they set forth in the “Via Campesina Manifesto for COP30” and, even more importantly, for readers to turn these demands into coordinated actions. On the eve of the COP30, La Via Campesina, a social movement of more than 200 million peasants and rural, coastal and urban communities, issued an urgent and radical call: “The time for false promises and market solutions must end.” The document is divided into three parts: the structural causes of the crisis, the movement's demands, and the solutions it proposes.

A group of grassroots communicators traversed “seas, rivers, jungles, valleys, plains, and, of course, indigenous communities, in five states of the Mexican Republic” to document the impacts of three megaprojects in Mexico: The Maya Train, the Morelos Integral Project and the Interoceanic Corridor. Among their findings, they confirmed that dispossession is advancing along the train route, and that the “progress” promised by the Morelos Integral Project (PIM by its Spanish acronym) – which consists of a thermoelectric power plant, a gas pipeline and an aqueduct – is synonymous with destruction, seeing as it has engendered several resistance struggles.

Can the World Bank use the urgency of the climate crisis as an excuse to favor the same financial and corporate interests that have caused the crisis? The answer is yes, as shown in the report "Climatewash: The World Bank's Fresh Offensive On Land Rights," published this year by the Oakland Institute. The report takes an in-depth look at the World Bank's Global Program for Land Tenure Security and Land Access for Climate Goals, launched in 2024. The program's objective is to "formalize" land ownership in the Global South, supposedly in order to enable what it presents as climate actions – such as reforestation and renewable energy projects.