Well, for what it's worth, according to the articles it amounted to billions of dollars. It was supposed to be used to police the area for deforestation, fires and other things.

As a Brazilian I disagree that other countries should be paying us anything, we should sort those problems by ourselves.

For sure, I don't disagree with you, but I dont think the world can wait for those problems to be solved.

Oh, that's for sure.

However I think there's a huge incentive problem here: The people who stand to gain from foreign money coming to "save Amazon" (Brazil's general population) is not the same people who stand to gain from its destruction (businesspeople).

Second, a large chunk of the current government ideologically believe there's nothing wrong with deforestation, or deny it, or deny climate change. Hell, some of them are flat-earthers.

It is common in the Brazilian right to associate environmental causes (include climate change) with leftists, and the current Brazilian government treats the left (any kind of left) as the worst possible enemies. So a sure-fire way of not being heard by the right is... talking about environmental causes/climate change.

So, in the end it should really be an astonishing amount to make sense for the current government to change its course.