New $100M South America Fire Fund Launches as UN Report Flags Forest Funding Gap

A new fund aiming to raise $100 million for firefighting in South America was announced this week at New York Climate Week and the U.N. General Assembly, even as a United Nations report released Thursday highlighted a multibillion-dollar shortfall in financing to preserve tropical forests.

The fund, led by non-profits Renaissance Philanthropy and Conservation X Labs, is anchored by a $30 million contribution from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and an additional $5 million from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. It seeks to improve detection and response to wildfires in South America, drawing on existing models such as a 15-year-old Indigenous fire brigade program in Bolivia and a fire-detection camera network in Brazil.

"We have to respond to fire in South America like we would any humanitarian crisis," said Alex Dehgan, CEO of Conservation X Labs and director of the South America fire fund at Renaissance Philanthropy.

The launch comes as wildfires spread across the Amazon during the peak of its dry season. On Wednesday, smoke blanketed Manaus, Brazil, pushing air quality to unhealthy levels, according to the air quality monitoring service IQAir.

"We're at the possibility that we might lose the Amazon altogether, and once we lose the Amazon, we don't get it back — the next couple of years are really going to matter," said Kumar Garg, president of Renaissance Philanthropy, one of the groups steering the fund.

The fund excludes vast forested regions in Africa and Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia has also faced worsening fires, fanned by climate change and an intensifying El Nino. Massive fires in Indonesia have burned large stretches of land and raised public health concerns over toxic haze across the region.

"Forest fires are a global issue," said Bhima Yudhistira, executive director of the Jakarta-based Center of Economic and Law Studies, who called the exclusion of Southeast Asia "a big mistake." He added, "Many of the tropical forest regions are affected by forest fires and need international solidarity."

South America endured one of its most severe fire seasons in 2024, setting records across the Amazon, the Pantanal and the Chiquitano dry forest. Authorities, researchers and donors are racing to prevent a repeat this year and next, when El Nino is expected to worsen drought and heat.

Wildfires have increasingly driven forest loss as global temperatures rise. Burning trees releases emissions that drive hotter temperatures and make forests more fire-prone. A study published last year by the University of Maryland found that wildfires now burn more than twice as much tree cover each year as they did two decades ago, and more than three times as much in tropical forests. Unlike savannas, rainforests are not naturally adapted to fire, and worsening droughts have turned them into tinderboxes.

"The Amazon does not burn on its own," Dehgan said. "Nearly every fire in the basin is lit by a person, which means nearly every fire was a decision somebody made. Since humans have created the systems that drive the fire crisis, we know we can also fix it."

Nearly 80% of the world's remaining rainforests are in South America's Amazon Basin, Africa's Congo Basin and Southeast Asia's island of Borneo. Despite their role in biodiversity, ecosystem services and atmospheric moisture, "they remain chronically underfinanced," according to a report released Thursday by the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Conserving and restoring tropical forests, along with developing sustainable agroforestry, would require an additional $66.8 billion by 2030, the report estimated. As of 2023, funding had reached only $14.6 billion. The distribution of existing funds lacks coordination and is unequal, the study found. The Congo Basin, the world's largest net carbon sink, receives only 11% of international funding, and foreign aid is projected to decline another 15% this year.

Other initiatives have struggled with fundraising. The Tropical Forest Forever Facility, launched at last year's U.N. climate summit in Brazil, aims to provide developing countries with funds to keep forests standing but is struggling to meet its initial $10 billion target by the end of the year.

"It's a failure of the political system," said Lee White, one of the authors of the U.N. study and Gabon's former environment minister. He said election cycles of four to five years discourage governments from investing billions in a problem they believe will not become severe for decades. "Many wealthier nations believe they can adapt as climate impacts worsen, rather than investing large sums upfront in mitigation," he said.

International support for recent fires in Southeast Asia has been piecemeal, especially in Indonesia, which shares Borneo with Malaysia and Brunei. This has been one of the worst fire seasons in Indonesian history, Yudhistira said, with CELIOS estimating that fires from January to August will cost Indonesia around 40 to 123 trillion rupiah (approximately $2.2 to $6.8 million) in economic and health losses. Toxic haze has cancelled classes and disrupted flights in Indonesia and triggered public health concerns in nearby Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and the Philippines.

"The international community needs to support efforts to extinguish forest and land fires in Indonesia," said Bambang Hero Saharjo, director of the Regional Fire Management Resource Center — Southeast Asia.