The Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), which was created to fund long-term conservation of tropical forests, recently received a $500-million pledge, over 10 years, from the Netherlands, a significant boost for forest conservation. The Netherlands announced the pledge in an Oct 26 press release and estimated that the TFFF has the potential to protect 800 to 900 million hectares (2.0 to 2.2 billion acres) of tropical forest, an area roughly 200 times the size of the Netherlands. The long-term goal is to create a $125 billion endowment fund for the TFFF. Current pledges add up to roughly $7.8 billion. The TFFF was launched by Brazil at the 30th U.N. Climate Change Conference in November 2025. It’s a partnership between tropical countries that need funding to protect their forests, investors and donor countries that want to address climate change and biodiversity loss through mitigating deforestation. The collaboration includes the private sector, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, the World Bank, scientists, economists, finance experts, and civil society partners. The TFFF is modeled like a sovereign wealth fund in which governments and private investors contribute to an investment fund and those investment gains, or profits, are then distributed to tropical countries to keep their forests standing. The hope is that predictable revenue from the TFFF will incentivize permanent conservation of forests over unsustainable development including logging, mining and ranching. Forest conservation is monitored using satellite imaging and scientific monitoring protocols to provide transparency and ensure forests are being protected. However, the TFFF has…This article was originally published on Mongabay

An ambitious effort to eradicate invasive spotted bass from South Africa’s Breekkrans River has unfolded about two hours north of Cape Town. Removing the bass has helped give the critically endangered doring fiery redfin (Pseudobarbus doring) a fighting chance against extinction. “Spotted bass were introduced into the river system in the late 1930s,” Martine Jordaan, a faunal ecologist at Cape Nature, a provincial conservation authority, told Mongabay in a video call. “The main reason was to have a species that was good for angling. What makes bass a good angling fish makes it a bad invader. It really goes after the small fish, and most of our native fish are 12 centimeters [4.7 inches] and smaller.” Jordaan said that after the bass species had been introduced, it spread as far as the habitat allowed, only stopping when encountering natural barriers such as waterfalls. “Often you find that native fish populations [are restricted to] streams where bass cannot invade,” Jordaan said. That was the case with the doring fiery redfin. “The Breekkrans River has the largest remaining population of doring fiery redfin with probably a few hundred adults,” Jeremy Shelton, a freshwater conservation ecologist working at the Freshwater Research Centre (FRC), told Mongabay by email. “The species also exists in another river, but in very low numbers.” Prior to the spotted bass eradication, the doring fiery redfin were confined to a 2-kilometer (1.2-mile) stretch of the Breekkrans River that remained bass-free. The Breekkrans River Restoration Project is run by the FRC…This article was originally published on Mongabay