Dear Brazil,

You hold more than half your land in forest, about 4.9 million square kilometres of it, and 26,918 cubic metres of renewable fresh water for each of you. In 2021, renewables supplied 77 percent of your electricity. Almost every one of you has basic water and power, and fewer than 2.5 percent of you are undernourished. On four of the seven standards that Perfect Nations measures, you stand near the Living Line.

In November 2025, at Belém, you launched the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, a fund built to pay tropical nations for the forest they keep standing. By September 2026 its commitments had reached $7.3 billion. That is a new kind of sovereign asset: a forest valued alive rather than cleared. You designed it, and the world is paying into it.

“You built a fund that pays the world to keep forests standing. Build the one that keeps every citizen above the Living Line.”

The gap is closer to home. In 2024, 20.6 percent of you lived on less than $8.30 a day, the World Bank line for a nation at your income, the standard furthest below the Living Line. Health service coverage stands at 84, close behind. One in seven city dwellers lives in a slum, in a nation where nearly nine in ten live in cities. Bolsa Família, with World Bank support of $300 million, protects the incomes of the poorest families with young children. It is the instrument nearest the standard furthest below the Living Line.

Your wealth is not in question. Its reach is. The forest fund proves that you can design an instrument that pays for an outcome and persuade the world to finance it. The same design, aimed inward, would pay for every family that crosses the income line and stays there. You built a fund that pays the world to keep forests standing. Build the one that keeps every citizen above the Living Line.