In defense of spending the $2.35B Indigenous forest pledge on European consultants

I am, quite frankly, exhausted. Earlier this week, the Forest Tenure Funders Group announced a historic triumph. They did not just meet the $1.7 billion pledge to support Indigenous land rights made at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference—they shattered it. A staggering $2.35 billion has been mobilized between 2021 and 2025 to protect the earth’s most vital carbon sinks. This is a monumental victory for global sustainability.

And yet, the usual chorus of professional malcontents is already whining. Their grievance? That only a microscopic fraction of this $2.35 billion actually reached Indigenous peoples and local communities in the form of direct funding.

To which I say: it is time we all grew up and learned how the global economy works. Deploying billions of dollars is not a charity bake sale. You cannot simply wire a billion euros to a forest-dwelling community in the Amazon basin and expect them to produce a compliant, quarterly ESG framework mapping their scope-three emissions.

Over a deeply sobering plate of sustainably farmed sea bass at last year's COP summit, a senior director for a prominent Geneva-based environmental steering committee broke it down for me. The sheer logistical nightmare of trying to give money to people who live in the forest—rather than people who write white papers about the forest from an office in Zurich—is insurmountable. The communities in question simply lack the institutional bandwidth to absorb this kind of capital.

He is, of course, entirely correct. The $2.35 billion was spent exactly where it needed to be spent: on rigorous, multiphase feasibility studies, capacity-building seminars in European capitals, and the creation of a stunning, 900-page PDF detailing the theoretical legal frameworks of hypothetical land tenure.

Activists love to fetishize direct funding, as if handing a local land-defense group the cash to hire a lawyer is somehow more effective than paying a London PR firm $40 million to rebrand the concept of a tree. We have spent decades building a robust, carbon-neutral ecosystem of international NGOs, steering committees, and high-level working groups. Defunding them now to give cash directly to the global south would be a devastating blow to the green economy.

Consider the alternative. Let us imagine, for a horrifying moment, that the FTFG had simply handed $2.35 billion to the actual Indigenous communities managing the forests. What would they have done with it?

They would have bought back stolen land. They would have hired local legal representation to fight illegal logging operations. They would have paid for physical security against cartel violence.

Do you see the problem here? At no point in that sequence of events is a European consultant paid $400 an hour to facilitate a stakeholder alignment workshop. There is no synergy. There is no digital transformation of the canopy. There is no measurable output that can be presented on a jumbotron in Davos. It is just raw, unquantifiable survival, which is completely useless to the modern sustainability sector.

I have seen the FTFG’s final report, and the administrative overhead required to figure out how to eventually, maybe, theoretically help local communities is staggering. It takes a village of Ivy League graduates to ensure that not one cent of climate finance is deployed without a bespoke stakeholder matrix.

Let that sink in. We are talking about the potential collapse of the entire climate-finance consulting industry. If we set the precedent that money meant for Indigenous people can just be given to Indigenous people, we will have thousands of highly educated sustainability coordinators wandering the streets of Oslo and Geneva with absolutely nothing to do.

To truly understand the value of indirect funding, one must look at the sheer scale of the administrative apparatus we have constructed. Between 2021 and 2025, the FTFG didn't just spend $2.35 billion; they created an entire micro-economy of oversight. There are now sub-committees dedicated entirely to evaluating the performance of other sub-committees. There are task forces whose sole mandate is to draft the mission statements for future task forces.

This is not waste. This is infrastructure. We are building the foundational architecture required to think about saving the planet.

When you complain that the direct funding remains low, you are ignoring the invisible labor of the thousands of professionals who wake up every morning in temperate climates, log into Slack, and work tirelessly to ensure that the global south’s carbon footprint is being properly tabulated. These people have mortgages. They have children who need to attend private schools with robust environmental science programs. Are we really supposed to defund their livelihoods just so a community in the Congo Basin can afford a satellite phone?

I recently sat on a panel titled Decolonizing the Canopy at a luxury eco-resort in the Swiss Alps, and the consensus was clear: the best way to help marginalized groups is to hold onto their money until they learn how to speak our language. Until a tribal elder can properly articulate their strategic KPIs on a Zoom call, they are simply not ready for fiscal autonomy.

During the Q&A segment of that very panel, an audience member—presumably a student who had somehow bypassed the $3,000 entry fee—had the audacity to accuse the FTFG of greenwashing. They argued that funneling forest-protection funds into the bank accounts of Western intermediaries was effectively stranding the assets of the very people we were trying to save.

I nearly spilled my sparkling water. The absolute arrogance of assuming that an international pledge belongs to the people it was pledged to. When a multinational corporation or a coalition of developed nations announces a $1.7 billion commitment, they are not writing a blank check to the wilderness. They are purchasing the moral high ground, and the moral high ground requires rigorous, third-party certification.

We must look at the bigger picture. By keeping the funding safely circulating within the accounts of reputable international NGOs, we ensure that the money is never tainted by the messy, unpredictable reality of frontline activism. If a local community uses direct funding to blockade a logging road, that creates a PR crisis. If an NGO uses the same funding to publish a peer-reviewed study on the theoretical benefits of blockading a logging road, that creates a deliverable. One is a liability; the other is a triumph of sustainability.

We cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The $2.35 billion pledge was a resounding success for the climate transition. It sustained thousands of vital, six-figure jobs in the global north. And if the forests burn to the ground while we wait for the final audit to clear, at least we will have the receipts.