A participant plants local green plants in a park as part of Ethiopia’s Green Legacy Initiative, which aims to plant 7.5 billion trees by the end of the year, at Jifara Ber site, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in July 2025. (AP Photo/Amanuel Birhane)
In this story, I had an opportunity to evaluate an increasingly common national strategy of combatting climate change: planting trees. Lots and lots and lots of trees.
I first became familiar with massive tree-planting pledges as a way of fighting climate change at COP20 in Lima, Peru in 2014. The Bonn Challenge promised to reforest 350 million hectares of deforested or degraded land by 2030. The person declaring the great promise of this pledge was Bianca Jagger, the former wife of the Mick Jagger; her environmental nonprofit was an official sponsor of the challenge. It sounded great at the time. It sounded far less great as time went on.
Over the years, the national promises have mounted — to the extent where they became unrealistic if not plain misleading. Rather than do the hard work of reducing emissions and protecting biodiverse forests, countries simply promised to plant more and more trees — often in ecosystems such as savannas and grasslands that would be damaged by such efforts.
The new study in Science that I report on makes clear that there is far less available land for reforestation than imagined. Perhaps more importantly, as forestry expert Bill Moomaw shared with me, there is no shortcut to slowing down the ever-accelerating climate crisis.
Monoculture tree farms do very little to sequester carbon compared to mature, biodiverse forests. They do even less to harbor biodiversity. Here, you see an oil palm plantation (left) and native tropical rainforest on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. Image by Rhett Ayers Butler/Mongabay.
Tropical forests like this one in the Peruvian Amazon could qualify for annual payments from the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) to help keep them standing and delivering planetary ecosystem services — especially carbon sequestration that slows the rate of climate change. Image by Justin Catanoso
In this story, I revisit a promising initiative I first wrote about at the UN biodiversity meeting in Cali, Colombia, in October, 2024. At Climate Week 2025, Brazilian President Lula stepped forward to pledge the first $1 billion to a tropical forest protection fund unlike any other, as my sources have told me.
Highlights from my story, as summarized from my story by my editor, Glenn Scherer.
The Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) — a proposed $125 billion fund to conserve tropical forests worldwide — was developed by Brazil in 2023, and pushed forward in 2024 at the UN biodiversity summit in Colombia. Since then, momentum has built in support of this market-driven approach to conserving tropical forests.
Once fully established, the $125 billion fund would spin off as much a $4 billion in interest annually (above what is paid to investors), potentially going to more than 70 TFFF-eligible developing nations, which collectively hold more than one billion hectares of tropical forests. The fund could be operational before 2030.
At Climate Week in New York City on Sept 23, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced that his country will invest the first $1 billion in the fund. Other nations, including China, Norway, the UK, Germany, Japan and Canada seem poised to contribute. Even oil producing nations like Saudi Arabia have shown interest.
But hurdles lie ahead: TIFFF needs $25 billion from sovereign nations and $100 billion from private investors before a full launch, with Indigenous and local communities (IPLCs) to be major benefactors. The make-or-break moment for TIFFF is expected to occur at the UN climate summit (COP30) in Belém, Brazil Nov. 10-21, 2025.
Marina Silva, Brazil’s minister of the environment and climate change, has been instrumental in TFFF development and was in New York City during Climate Week to discuss it with other environmental ministers. She is shown here in an Oct. 2024 meeting with journalists at the UN biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia. Image by Justin Catanoso for Mongabay.
Barry McCovey has been director of the Yurok’s fisheries department for a quarter-century and is seen here on the Klamath. He says that while the four dams coming down on the Upper Klamath River is a crucial step toward restoring what was once the third-largest salmon run on the West Coast of the United States, the tribe’s reclamation of the Blue Creek watershed might be even more important to the eventual recovery of the entire ecosystem. Image courtesy of Matt Mais of the Yurok Tribe.
The genesis of this Northern California story began in Paris, France, in March 2024. There, I was visiting my friend and former student Phil Glynn, where he lives with his family. I asked if he knew of any environmental stories in the Pacific Northwest, where I would be traveling in late July. It wasn’t a random question. Phil and his wife Elizabeth, also a former student, run Kansas City-based Travois, a full-service company that facilities economic development and conservation on Indigenous lands across the U.S.
Phil told me about reclamation and restoration of Blue Creek. I recognized its news value and environmental importance immediately, as I explain in this story. What followed in the spring and summer of 2024 was a host of interviews with leaders of Portland, Oregon-based Western Rivers Conservancy, the Yurok tribal leadership and an immersive visit to Northern California, the Klamath River and, most importantly, ice-cold Blue Creek (in which I snorkeled to look for salmon!).
One of the biggest environmental stories of 2024 was the removal of all four dams on the Klamath River, the largest river restoration project in U.S. history. But without the concurrent revitalization of Blue Creek, what was once the West Coast’s third-largest salmon run would have little chance of full recovery. While it took a generation and a pioneering $60 million fundraising effort on behalf of Wester Rivers, the Blue Creek watershed and the salmon are coming back to the Yurok, the land’s rightful stewards — a rare environmental success story involving a timber-rich ecosystem and California’s largest Indigenous tribe.
Sue Doroff, former president and co-founder of Oregon-based Western Rivers Conservancy, spent the better part of the last 18 years working diligently and creatively to raise the $60 million required to buy the entire 19,000-hectare (47,000-acre) Blue Creek watershed from a timber company for the Yurok Tribe. Standing in the creek, she says, “We are in the business of forever; that’s how we feel about the Yurok taking over as stewards of this vital creek and watershed.” Image by Justin Catanoso.
The new framework only addresses temperature increase and extreme heat disasters. Other climate change-intensified extreme weather events, like 2024’s Hurricane Helene that inundated Appalachian Mountain communities would require far more complex scientific assessments. A North Carolina plaintiff, for example, who wanted to sue fossil fuel firms for their role in the disaster would need to prove in court how extreme heat warmed the Gulf of Mexico to record levels, causing Helene to pick up excessive moisture, intensifying the storm and creating 1000-year floods. Drawing such connections may become possible in the future. Image courtesy of NCDOTcommunications.
I’ll let my editor, Glenn Scherer, in his summarizing bullet points, describe this story of mine:
In recent decades a growing number of lawsuits have been launched by states, cities and other government entities to hold fossil fuel companies financially liable for the climate harm caused by the greenhouse gas emissions their products produce.
But those efforts often come up against challenging legal arguments made by the companies saying that their actions and emissions cannot be scientifically linked to specific climate change-driven extreme weather events.
Now, fast-advancing attribution science is offering answers to those legal arguments. A new study — published in Nature — has created a framework that connects the emissions over time of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies — BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Saudi Aramco and Gazprom — to rising temperatures and specific heat-related climate disasters.
Researchers say that, in time, this framework for assigning attribution and financial damages could be extended to specific fossil fuel companies and a range of climate change-intensified extreme events such as hurricanes, flooding, sea-level rise and wildfires. The framework has yet to be tested in court.
Pope Francis was very much a man of the people while traveling to 68 countries during his pontificate. At least once a week while in Rome, he would cruise around St. Peters Square to greet pilgrims and tourists who had come to visit Vatican City, like this encounter in June 2016. Photo by Justin Catanoso for Mongabay.
This story is one I was both sad and eager to write. Sad because of the death of Pope Francis at 88, one of the most extraordinary leaders of the global Catholic Church in generations; eager because Francis in a very tangible way brought me to Mongabay; I’ve been covering for the past decade his ceaseless crusade to implore people of all faiths to protect “God’s creation” and fight climate change we are all making worse.
In 2015, I had recently pivoted from local news reporting to international environmental reporting after a nudge and plenty of inspiration from my friend and colleague Miles Silman, a leading tropical ecologist at Wake Forest University, where we both teach. That summer, while I was teaching a summer session for Wake students in Rome, I was contacted by Jon Sawyer, founder and then CEO of the Pulitzer Center, with an offer to travel to Latin America — ethnic home of Pope Francis — and evaluate whether people there (overwhelmingly Catholic) were apt to listen to and follow his teachings in Laudato Si, a Catholic teaching document of the highest order, and the first focused exclusively on climate change, environmental degradation and humankind’s heavy hand in destroying the planet. The encyclical made global headlines, inspired environmental activism and incited a growing number of enemies. It’s spirit is woven throughout the preamble of the historic Paris Agreement on climate change of 2015.
I said yes to Jon Sawyer’s offer and chose to report from all over Peru for three weeks. Enrique Ortiz, my friend and Peruvian biologist, agreed to be my fixer, and my oldest daughter Emilia came along for two of those weeks as my photographer. The stories I produced enabled me to make a real pitch to Mongabay founder and editor-in-chief Rhett Butler. He agreed to take my stores, assigned Glenn Scherer to be my editor, and Glenn and I have been working together ever since.
When the pope died on April 21, 2025, at the Vatican the day after Easter, Glenn and I spoke soon after. Given the many stories I’ve written on Francis and the intersection between faith and climate action over the years, Glenn urged me to put together a reflection on Francis’ environmental legacy. I agreed, leaning heavily on the pope’s own words and exhortations among three pioneering documents since 2015.
Except: This singular leadership will surely be a lasting part of his legacy, as his words continue spreading like soft ripples across the Earth he loved. “There is a mystical meaning to be found in a leaf, in a mountain trail, in a dewdrop, in a poor person’s face,” Francis wrote. “The world sings of an infinite Love: how can we fail to care for it?”
In 2015’s Laudato Si’, Pope Francis wrote about our responsibility to each other and to the planet, with much of his inspirational language later woven into the preamble of the historic 2015 Paris climate agreement. In 2023’s Laudate Deum, he urged world leaders to take decisive action on climate change, before the planet reaches “the point of no return.” Image by Justin Catanoso for Mongabay.
In 2020, two years after the Vattenfall wood pellet energy plant was proposed, forest advocates organized a youth protest outside Vattenfall headquarters as part of the National Children’s Climate March. Image courtesy of the Clean Air Committee in the Netherlands.
As this stories describes, forest advocates were able to take significant credit in The Netherlands when one of its largest energy providers canceled plans in February 2025 to build the largest wood-pellet-only power plant just outside Amsterdam. It took six years and a circuitous route through the Dutch court system, but on a rare occasion, the environmental argument that burning forest biomass is not the climate-friendly solution it is touted to be until won out.
While the Dutch, like the South Koreans, appear to be inching away from industrial-scale forest biomass energy, neither is close to giving up entirely on wood burning, or subsidizing the burning, as they both try to meet 2030 legal deadlines to phase out all coal burning.
In fact, the elusive promises of BECCS — Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage — is now being touted as the reason to continue burning wood pellets because, it is theorized, that emissions can be easily trapped and permanently buried underground.
There is a significant flaw in that plan in that the scientific consensus illustrates that BECCS technology is years, if not decades, away from effective implementation.
“The irony is that my country (The Netherlands) and the EU have called burning biomass carbon neutral, right?” Dutch forest advocate Fenna Swart told me. “Now the claim with BECCS is that the air will be even cleaner. But in our view, it’s just another flawed policy to allow business as usual.”
A close-up image of one of the posters held aloft by demonstrators to protest plans by Vattenfall to build the Netherlands’ largest woodburning energy plant. Image courtesy of the Clean Air Committee in the Netherlands.
Tree felling on an energy plantation concession in Indonesia where wood has been used to supply wood pellets to South Korea. Image courtesy of FWI.
This story here, my latest on the issue of global forest biomass for energy, sends a bit of a mixed message. Projected supply and demand for wood pellets appears to be rising dramatically through 2030, with more wood coming from tropical forests than every before.
On the other hand, there appear to be a few cracks forming in the long-term viability of an industry that has been on a steady, upward trajectory for 15 years or more — save for Enviva’s self-inflicted business wounds that led to its 2024 bankruptcy. Subsidies are being inched back on South Korea and Japan. Drax is still getting a ton of British subsidies for five more years, but far less than the previous 10. Germany’s second-largest city, Hamburg, nixed a conversion of a coal-burning plant to wood, admitting that it was not a climate friendly move. And a highly regarded investment think tank is raising a bright red flag to investors to think twice before investing in wood-pellet manufacturing stocks.
A source and forest advocate in South Korea went as far as to tell me he believes we are beginning to see that beginning of a paradigm shift regarding forest biomass for energy. The scientific arguments and journalistic reporting, including my own, that challenge industry line that it a climate-friendly alternative to coal, grow stronger every year. Is the tide really turning?
Meanwhile, in the near-term, the industry continues to grow, and native forests across the US Southeast, British Columbia, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, will continue to be diminished and degraded, many replaced by tree farms, to feed immediate demand.
Estimate of global wood pellet production and use in metric tons by nation by 2030. Data sourced from the International Energy Agency’s Net Zero Scenario study. Image courtesy of the Environmental Paper Network.
COP16 President Susana Muhamad. Top environmental groups and NGOs were largely complimentary of the outcomes achieved in Rome under the leadership of Muhamad. Image by IISD/ENB | Mike Muzurakis.
I spent eight days in Cali, Colombia in October 2024 covering my first UN Convention on Biological Diversity summit. I left before the final day, but as this story illustrates, it ended up not being the final day.
Delegates left the hardest work for last — specific strategies by which nations and non-government actors could reach $200 billion annually in finance to protect nature and stave off deforestation and species extinctions. They ran out of time. Delegates fled to catch flights at the Cali airport. And the COP16 president, Susana Muhamad, was forced to close the biennial meeting prematurely.
Delegates did agree to meet for three days in February in Rome (Feb. 25-27) to complete their work. And they did. As best they can. My story overviews what they accomplished and the difficulty they will have in reaching their ambitious and critically important goal. Alas, I reported from home in North Carolina, not from Rome, my favorite city in the world.
An Indigenous park guard on forest patrol in Suriname. A new funding mechanism aims to pay tropical countries like Suriname to keep trees standing and forests intact. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
It’s always a pleasure to join the Mongabay podcast with my colleague Mike DiGirolamo, who is now based in Australia. He was interested in discussing, in part with me, the most significant story I reported from Colombia in October 2024 from the United Nations biodiversity summit, or COP16.
Here’s what Mike writes: The Brazilian government in 2023 announced a novel funding mechanism to incentivize forest preservation: the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF). In an episode of Mongabay’s weekly podcast Newscast, host Mike DiGirolamo explored what experts think about the TFFF, what it can do, and what it can’t.
Mongabay contributor Justin Catanoso, who has written previously about the new fund, also known as the Tropical Forest Finance Facility, told DiGirolamo a key component that makes it different is that the money is neither a loan nor a donation. Instead, it’s an investment fund, where the “investors get paid back first, and the money that is generated by the investments above what the investors get is what will be given to the tropical countries,” Catanoso said.
Charlotte Streck, co-founder of advisory firm Climate Focus, also joined the podcast. She told Mike that the TFFF “has great potential because it is put forward and supported by tropical rainforest countries.”
Felled hardwood and pine cut from a dense forest and piled high on a 52-acre lot in Edenton, North Carolina. Image by Bobby Amoroso.
It’s not often that a news organization reflects on its coverage over recent years to evaluate the impact that that coverage has had on a region, a group of people, and in this case, an industry. But in making the case to our global readers and funders, Mongabay recaps important stories or series of stories to let people know that independent environmental journalism can and does make a difference in the world.
In this story penned by Mongabay editors, they recap my coverage of the forest biomass industry over the last several years and explain the impact it has and continues to have. The story rightfully focuses on one of the most prominent and impactful stories of my long career in journalism — the one and only whistleblower to ever come forward from inside the forest biomass industry (from Enviva, once the world’s largest producer of wood pellets for industrial-scale energy) and his candid, verifiable attack on his company’s climate- and environmentally friendly claims of the product it produces. That story, which has a complementary video, was published in December 2022.
Here’s an excerpt from Mongabay’s story of my reporting:
“This case demonstrates how independent journalism can expose greenwashing, inspire tangible action, inform public policy, and create ripple effects across sectors. Mongabay’s reporting uncovered the troubling realities of the biomass energy industry, and it empowered governments, financial institutions, and legal advocates to take decisive action in the pursuit of accountability and environmental justice.”
