Latin America plays a major role in the global discussion on forests, as it is home to 23% of the world's forests, with ecosystems that are fundamental to climate mitigation, adaptation, biodiversity, water security, and other functions. At the same time, it is the region of the world that recorded the highest annual net forest loss between 2015 and 2025, at 4.1 million hectares per year. The pressures on these ecosystems stem not only from environmental policy challenges but also from production, trade and financial decisions, illegal economies, and territorial governance challenges. Protecting forests therefore requires addressing the various drivers of their loss and degradation.
Latin American civil society has come together to determine what it will take for the global mandate to halt and reverse deforestation and forest degradation to move beyond a general aspiration and become an operational implementation agenda. The ultimate goal is to develop a tool that helps guide national decisions, mobilize cooperation and financing, and deliver verifiable results without creating a parallel agenda.
The collective proposal brings together territorial rights, deforestation-free supply chains, and the alignment of financial flows. Rather than replacing existing instruments, it seeks to strengthen them by identifying targets, responsible parties, resources, indicators, and cooperation needs, contributing both to the global process launched through COP30 and to Latin American countries' implementation agendas, while recognizing their different contexts and capacities.
Key recommendations
- Strengthen territorial rights. Advance the titling, delimitation, and demarcation of at least 80% of Indigenous territories and territories of Indigenous Peoples in Voluntary Isolation and Initial Contact (PIACI), as well as the territories of Afro-descendant peoples and traditional and tribal communities, with legal protection and guarantees of autonomy.
- Ensure protection for Indigenous Peoples in Voluntary Isolation and Initial Contact (PIACI). Guarantee recognition of their territories and their inviolability. For peoples in isolation, this means prohibiting any external interference and respecting the principle of no contact, alongside protection measures in buffer zones and cross-border cooperation.
- Establish deforestation-free supply chains. Introduce binding zero-deforestation commitments across 100% of priority sectors by 2030, including agroforestry activities, large-scale mining, and hydrocarbons. These obligations must cover production, trade, and markets, with verifiable mechanisms and consequences for non-compliance.
- Increase financing for forests. Reach USD 300 billion in annual global forest financing by 2030, which would require mobilizing approximately USD 216 billion more per year compared with 2023 levels. The resources would be directed toward conservation, restoration, the bioeconomy, sustainable supply chains, and capacity-building for implementing forest policies.
- Redirect harmful financial flows. Redirect public and private investments and subsidies that support deforestation-linked activities before 2030. This requires identifying risks, strengthening financial disclosure standards, and integrating forest protection criteria into investment and financing decisions.
- Guarantee direct financing for peoples and communities. Ensure that 100% of multilateral development banks and climate funds implement direct-access agreements for Indigenous Peoples and local communities by 2030, through flexible, long-term mechanisms aligned with their governance and territorial planning practices.
The Roadmap can add value if it organizes that architecture around concrete targets and a paradigm shift: treating forests as a development, productive transformation, territorial security, and economic alignment agenda.
Forest protection begins with territorial rights
Legal certainty over land tenure is a necessary condition for strengthening forest conservation. Where territories lack recognition, delimitation, or effective protection, communities face greater difficulties exercising self-governance and responding to extractive pressures and irregular occupation.
States must therefore work with the peoples concerned to define procedures for land titling, demarcation, and territorial recognition, backed by legal frameworks, budgets, and oversight mechanisms. Equally important is respecting the autonomy and distinct rights of different peoples and communities without treating their legal status as equivalent.
For PIACI, this protection requires specific measures. Peoples in voluntary isolation must have strict guarantees of no contact and territorial inviolability, while peoples in initial contact need culturally appropriate participation and protection mechanisms. Coordination between countries is especially important where their territories cross national borders.
Supply chains: from voluntary commitments to verifiable compliance
Transforming supply chains requires action both in productive sectors and in the mechanisms through which goods linked to forest loss are traded. Corporate voluntary commitments are not enough when challenges persist in tracing products back to their origins and verifying compliance.
Binding legislation on environmental and human rights due diligence, interoperable traceability systems, and public access to value-chain information should take priority. Oversight must also cover intermediaries and indirect suppliers, where informality and opacity may persist.
These measures must be accompanied by technical and financial cooperation for producer countries, as well as safeguards to avoid placing disproportionate burdens on smallholder producers, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities. Ultimately, effective forest protection depends not only on trade rules but also on the institutional capacities and territorial rights guarantees needed to enforce them.
Financing conservation also means changing incentives
Mobilizing new resources and redirecting harmful financing are complementary dimensions of the same economic transformation. Expanding conservation and restoration funding would have limited impact if other financial decisions continued to favor activities posing a high risk of deforestation.
Applying mechanisms such as the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), debt-for-nature swaps, carbon markets, thematic bonds, and forest bioeconomy financing requires addressing differences in governance, fiscal capacity, traceability, and benefit-sharing. For debt-for-nature swaps in particular, safeguards and transparency in environmental markets need to be strengthened, and credit instruments tailored to sustainable forest activities need to be created.
It is also necessary to review potentially harmful agricultural subsidies and incorporate deforestation risks into financial supervision and the decisions of multilateral development banks. In every case, the aim is to channel resources toward activities compatible with forest conservation and sustainable use.
Direct access to financing as a condition of territorial justice
The availability of funding does not guarantee that it will reach those who manage forest territories. Fiduciary requirements, complex administrative procedures, and intermediary mechanisms can limit the effective participation of Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
Efforts should therefore focus on establishing direct-access agreements with ten-year time horizons, capable of supporting life plans and community processes that extend beyond individual project cycles. Such agreements would enable more stable and flexible financial relationships aligned with territorial priorities.
Ensuring access to financing also requires recognizing peoples and communities as participants in the design, governance, and decision-making surrounding those resources, rather than solely as recipients of benefits.
Monitoring, governance, and territorial response
Forest targets require institutional capacities that connect available information with timely decisions. Satellite systems, forest inventories, and community monitoring can help identify critical areas, but their value depends on triggering coordinated responses.
Latin American civil society therefore proposes incorporating milestones, responsible parties, budgets, and indicators into existing instruments for the 2027–2030 period. Alerts about deforestation, fires, degradation, or mining should lead to action by environmental, judicial, territorial, and financial authorities.
This response must distinguish between networks that finance and sustain illegal activities and vulnerable populations that need protection and economic alternatives.
Similarly, monitoring must extend beyond the loss of forest cover to include degradation, fragmentation, fires, and territorial resilience. Protection for environmental defenders, Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC), and fair benefit-sharing must form part of implementation safeguards.
Regional cooperation to connect forests, trade, and the energy transition
The drivers of deforestation do not necessarily stop at national borders. Trade in high-risk goods, illegal economies, and pressures on shared ecosystems call for cooperation that brings together monitoring capacities, customs controls, trade standards, and financial mechanisms.
The Amazon is a priority for this coordination. Existing regional institutions can support coordinated responses to forest loss and degradation, provided they enable information-sharing, strengthen territorial governance, and direct resources toward verifiable interventions.
Cooperation must also connect the forest agenda with energy decisions. Infrastructure, mining, renewable energy, and bioenergy projects can create new pressures on territories if they fail to incorporate ecological protection and rights-based criteria.
These considerations must be integrated into planning, permits, and investment decisions, including assessments of cumulative impacts, territorial safeguards, and restoration. In this way, forest protection can contribute to a just energy transition without becoming disconnected from decisions on productive development.
From global commitments to results-oriented implementation
To connect existing commitments with the capacities needed to fulfill them, coordination among governments, financial institutions, territorial organizations, and multilateral bodies must be strengthened, making use of instruments already in place. This also means recognizing that forest protection cannot be separated from the economic and social conditions driving forest transformation.
The period leading up to 2030 offers an opportunity to organize regional responses that combine verifiable commitments, cooperation, and rights guarantees. Progress can be assessed more clearly if forest targets are incorporated into concrete decisions on territory, production, trade, and financing.
The challenge is to turn this architecture of commitments into an agenda capable of sustaining the protection of forests and the communities connected to them. Latin American civil society's proposals take up this challenge by setting targets, recognizing existing instruments, identifying gaps, and highlighting the solutions needed to move from mandate to implementation.
Read the full publication to explore the six proposed targets, existing instruments, implementation gaps, and solutions identified at the national, regional, and global levels.
How to cite the document
Climate Civil Society Organizations from Latin America and the Caribbean. (2026, June). Forests of Latin America: Civil Society Contributions to the Roadmap to Halt and Reverse Deforestation and Forest Degradation by 2030 and 2050.
Latin American civil society's forest priorities could gain greater influence within the global Roadmap if they are translated into verifiable targets, partnerships, and implementation support. This approach aligns with Transforma's programmatic priority of “Latin American Leadership and Influence.
Decisions to strengthen regional influence on forests
Transforma's programmatic priority of “Latin American Leadership and Influence” seeks to strengthen the region's ability to shape global climate decisions. In that context, the collective contribution proposes, among others, the following measures:
- Incorporate targets into existing instruments: countries should select the priorities relevant to their contexts and define milestones, responsible parties, resources, and indicators to facilitate implementation and monitoring.
- Strengthen regional cooperation: harmonize standards, exchange information, and coordinate controls on supply chains and illicit activities that cross national borders.
- Establish inclusive governance: bring together governments, international cooperation, development banks, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities to mobilize political, technical, and financial support for forest targets.
- Strengthen multilateral follow-up: assess progress on forest targets and provide inputs for the second Global Stocktake in 2028, in coordination with other relevant international processes.
Making progress on these conditions would enable Latin America to strengthen its participation in global decisions on forests, with regional priorities supported by implementation mechanisms. It would also help integrate territorial rights and ecosystem protection into development and cooperation decisions.
