The Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) has announced that Brazil will launch a groundbreaking new financial framework—the Reversing Deforestation Mechanism (RDM)—during the COP30 climate summit in Belém in November 2025. This initiative is designed to address a critical gap in climate finance by creating a viable mechanism to fund large-scale forest restoration and sustainable land management.
The core goal is to shift tropical forests from being a source of climate risk to a lasting “climate asset.” The RDM is structured as a jurisdictional, results-based payment mechanism that would enable governments, multilateral institutions, and private companies to buy carbon credits based on net carbon removals achieved through verified forest restoration. CPI analysis suggests that at a carbon price of $50 per tonne, the RDM could potentially generate up to $100 billion in annual global revenue for tropical forest countries and could remove up to 2 gigatonnes of CO2 per year globally in its initial years of operation.
The launch is viewed as a pivotal moment for Brazil, which is hosting COP30 in the Amazon region, and seeks to mobilize international finance commensurate with the immense climate potential of forest restoration.
