The just-published COP30 Presidency's Forest Roadmap offers a timely opportunity to reinvigorate international cooperation on forests and build momentum towards the 2030 forest goals. The challenge now is to build on this opportunity to better align and connect existing efforts, bring underrepresented voices into decision-making, and tackle the implementation barriers that existing arrangements have struggled to address.
At the closing plenary of the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30), held in Belém in 2025, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago announced the development of two Presidency-led roadmaps: one on transitioning away from fossil fuels in a just, orderly, and equitable manner (TAFF) and another on enhancing efforts towards halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation by 2030.
The announcement from do Lago followed the failure of countries to reach consensus on including roadmaps on fossil fuels and deforestation in the summit’s headline political outcome, the “Global Mutirão”. The Brazilian Presidency nevertheless decided to take both initiatives forward, seeking to mobilise political support and cooperation beyond the formal negotiating process.
Both Roadmaps were launched on 3 November 2026, following an extensive multi-stakeholder consultation process.
Their publication marks an important moment in the international effort to advance existing climate, biodiversity and sustainable development commitments. But it also raises a more fundamental question: what happens now that the Roadmaps have been launched?
While the just energy transition agenda and TAFF Roadmap have gained unprecedented political visibility, notably through the Santa Marta Conference that took place in April 2026, the Forest Roadmap has maintained a comparatively lower political profile.
Yet its publication provides an important opening to reinvigorate international cooperation on forests and bring renewed political momentum to the 2030 forest goals.
Bringing Forests Back Into the Political Spotlight
Protecting and restoring forests’ ecological integrity is critical for climate stability and resilience, and has direct implications for biodiversity, the rights and territories of Indigenous Peoples, local livelihoods, food sovereignty and security, water cycling and many other ecosystem services underpinning human well-being and macroeconomic stability.
Over the past decades, governments and non-state actors have pursued a succession of initiatives and commitments on forests and land use, as well as a range of financial instruments and incentives to incentivise forest protection.
In 2014, nearly 40 governments, over 55 major companies and other actors signed the New York Declaration on Forests, pledging to eliminate deforestation from agricultural supply chains, halve deforestation by 2020 and end global natural forest loss by 2030. Most recently in 2021, the Glasgow Leaders Declaration on Forests and Land Use was launched and later endorsed by over 140 countries committing to “halting and reversing forest loss and land degradation by 2030”.
These 2030 forest goals - to halt and reverse deforestation and forest degradation by 2030 - were later formally cemented in the outcome of the Paris Agreement’s First Global Stocktake (GST 1), a periodic process to assess collective progress towards achieving its long-term goals.
However, many of these pledges and initiatives have fallen short of their intended outcomes.
While deforestation has slowed globally in the last decade, at the current rate of nearly 10.9 million hectares per year - roughly the size of South Korea -, the world remains seriously off track to meet these 2030 ambitions. Even more alarming is forest degradation, a largely “hidden crisis” that has been estimated to occur on a much greater scale than deforestation, yet remains chronically underreported and unmonitored.
These trends highlight the scale of the challenge facing global forest protection, and the persistent gap between political commitments and implementation on the ground.
What Does the COP30 Presidency Forest Roadmap Bring to the Table?
The decision to develop Roadmaps outside the formal negotiating process reflects the Brazilian COP30 Presidency’s broader vision of a “two-tier” approach to climate multilateralism. An approach that seeks to preserve consensus-based negotiations as the foundation of the international climate regime, while complementing them with an implementation-focused track mobilising coalitions of state and non-state actors around the delivery of already agreed upon commitments.
The Forest Roadmap aims to support progress towards the 2030 forest goals agreed under GST 1, by identifying priority pathways for action and providing a more coordinated framework for international cooperation and domestic efforts.
Acknowledging different national contexts, the first part of the Roadmap sets out a menu of recommendations for domestic actions across five areas: deforestation; forest degradation; restoration, reforestation and afforestation; sustainable forest management, bioeconomy and agroforestry; and forest conservation.
The second part addresses the international architecture and “enabling conditions” for domestic implementation, including on technical cooperation and capacity building, forest monitoring and international regulatory frameworks on trade and transnational environmental crime.
The third part examines the forest finance gap, and the range of national and international sources and instruments available to support forest action, including results-based payments, carbon markets, jurisdictional REDD+ and the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF). It also identifies opportunities to scale up resources and to better align existing instruments with the needs of countries and Indigenous Peoples, and local communities.
However, an important question is how far these proposals address the wider political-economic ‘rules of the game’ and structural drivers that continue to drive forest loss. While the Roadmap recognises issues such as debt and subsidies, it gives greater prominence to mobilising investment and developing forest-related financial instruments than to reforming the rules and incentives that direct capital flows towards activities driving deforestation, and ultimately reinforce countries' dependence on extractive development pathways.
Ensuring coherence between the TAFF and Forest Roadmaps will also be critical to avoid that efforts to accelerate the energy transition do not undermine forest protection. This is particularly relevant to the promotion of bioenergy and forest-based bioeconomy pathways, whose expansion risks creating competing pressures on land that threaten forest ecosystem integrity and undermine the rights and livelihoods of forest-dependent communities.
While reactions to its recommendations will continue to emerge in the coming weeks, the publication of the Roadmap should not become an endpoint in efforts to accelerate progress towards the 2030 forest goals.
Beyond the Launch: Delivering a Step Change in Implementation Ambition
With only four years remaining until 2030, and the Brazilian COP30 Presidency's mandate coming to an end, the priority now is to sustain political leadership and strengthen cooperation to advance domestic and international action on forests.
COP31 offers an early opportunity to reaffirm the international community’s commitment to the 2030 forest goals, including through a planned high-level event on forests and the second Global Stocktake (GST 2), beginning at COP31 and concluding at COP33 in 2028. The COP30 Presidency has expressed its intention to bring the Forest Roadmap into this process as an input.
But political momentum alone will not deliver the 2030 forest goals. A step change in cooperation is needed to overcome fragmentation and bring collective efforts to the scale and impact required, while building on existing initiatives.
Achieving such a step change in cooperation requires more equitable participation in decision-making by Indigenous Peoples, peasants, Afro-descendant communities, local communities and other rights-holders, who play a critical role in forest stewardship. Their meaningful participation, alongside that of civil society, must be central to implementing the forest goals.
As highlighted by the Roadmap, one way forward could be to explore the co-design of a multi-stakeholder process: a sustained platform for collaboration bringing together diverse actors and existing initiatives that could focus on addressing critical implementation gaps by facilitating opportunities for learning and collaboration.
The question is whether governments and other actors are prepared to take this forward, and change the way they work together to turn the political opportunity presented by the COP30 Presidency into a break with business as usual in cooperation on forests.
