U.S. election puts millions on the line for Amazon rainforest fund

US Elections 2024: Read our full coverage.

• Biden administration pledged $500 million to Amazon Fund
• Only $50 million delivered, the rest hinges on election
• The money could help avoid "climate tipping point"

LOS ANGELES – For more than a month, a team of some 270 firefighters has been battling a wall of flames consuming two Indigenous territories on the edge of Brazil's Amazon rainforest.

Their focus is to protect villages from the rapidly advancing fire line, said Ana Maria Canut, chief of operations in Mato Grosso state for Prevfogo, Brazil's main forest firefighting organisation.

"There is a lot of smog hitting the communities, making it hard to breathe," she said.

Though the firefighters are Brazilian, their Brasilia headquarters and much of their equipment was paid for by international donors aiming to protect the Amazon, one of the world's key bulwarks against climate change.

The money is channelled through the Amazon Fund, an international mechanism to direct aid to projects that halt and reverse deforestation, backed mainly by European donors, including Norway and Germany. 

But last year, U.S. President Joe Biden pledged to request Congress to contribute $500 million to the Amazon Fund over five years. That amount is equivalent to nearly 70% of all the funding the fund has received since its creation in 2008.

So far, the United States has been able to send around $50 million of the $500 million it pledged, as the rest of the money has to be appropriated by Congress, which did not pass a full 2025 budget ahead of the elections. 

Brazilian President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva plans to spend more than $200 million, drawing from the Amazon Fund and Brazil's Climate Fund, to launch what he has dubbed an "Arc of Restoration" programme. The plan is to recover 24 million hectares of forest in three decades, roughly the size of the United Kingdom, or about 30% of the Amazon's deforested area.

But the fate of these projects now hinges in part on the U.S. elections more than 3,000 miles (4,800 km) away.

Campaigns divided

Republican former President Donald Trump vows to back away from international climate deals if he wins next week, in stark contrast to his Democrat opponent Vice President Kamala Harris. 

"The failure of the U.S. to step up and begin to take this more seriously, and step up funding for things like the Amazon Fund would be a disaster," said Steve Schwartzman, the senior director of tropical forest policy at the Environmental Defense Fund, a group that lobbied Biden to make the Amazon Fund pledge.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment about its views on the Amazon Fund. 

But during his first term, Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement that aims to limit the increase in average global temperatures to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) and pursue efforts toward 1.5 C (2.7 F).

The Harris campaign also did not respond to a request for a comment, but Democratic lawmakers allied with the campaign said the current vice president would continue to push for funding if she were elected.

The Amazon's tipping point

The size of the United States' pledge makes it crucial to expanding the Amazon Fund's work.

Tereza Campello, socio-environmental director of the Brazilian Development Bank, which manages the fund, said the Amazon Fund was key to curbing climate change, given alternatives such as carbon capture technology are yet to be proven at scale.

"If we are not able to take this carbon out of the atmosphere and we keep emitting, (temperatures) will raise above 1.5 degrees with absolute certainty," she said.

The Amazon has lost about 13% of its original cover, according to an estimate by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project, and 38% of the forest has been degraded, research published in the journal Science said. 

The Amazon Fund is directing resources to complex and costly reforestation efforts that need a constant stream of support, said Alexis Bastos, senior project coordinator at Rioterra, an environmental NGO behind two Amazon Fund reforestation projects.

The Amazon Fund also helps pay for Brazil's environmental enforcement agency IBAMA and local firefighters, and is directing cash to promote alternatives to deforestation-linked industries, such as cattle ranching and mining.

As of October, the Amazon Fund had received 4.2 billion reais ($740 million) in donations from which 1.63 billion reais were paid into more than 600 partner institutions, according to the fund's website.

But even with that money and the pledged U.S. funds on top, the Amazon Fund would still need to be expanded significantly to counter the billion-dollar industries that are destroying the forest, said Beto Veríssimo, senior researcher at the Imazon environmental institute. 

The Election

U.S. environmentalists have pushed hard to get the Amazon Fund on the radar of policymakers and politicians, but with only a week to go to the polls, many fear for the future.

"It has not always been priority number one, or number two, or three ... But it should be," said Vanessa Fajans-Turner, director of Environmental Advocates New York, a non-profit environmental group, who has championed the fund. 

It is not just the presidential vote which matters. Republicans are unlikely to approve the rest of the promised money to the Amazon Fund if they keep their majority in the House of Representatives after the election, analysts said.

In April, Democratic members of Congress wrote to the leading members of the committee responsible for allocating the $500 million in the 2025 budget, urging them to back the pledged funding.

Mario Diaz-Balart, the Republican Congressman who chairs the committee, did not respond to a request for comment from Context, but analysts say his party is unlikely to set aside the funds if it keeps its majority in the House of Representatives in the election.

Democrat Congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove, who led the April letter, told Context the fate of U.S. support rested on the outcome of the polls. 

"If Trump were to win, he would not obligate these funds. What that could mean is ... irreversible climate chaos," she said.

(Reporting by Avi Asher-Schapiro and André Cabette Fábio; Editing by Jack Graham and Jon Hemming.)