Wealthy nations should pay dozens of the world’s poorest countries up to £19-billion a year to preserve their rainforests, according to a report commissioned by Gordon Brown.
The cash would fund a scheme where tropical countries would be rewarded for preserving the stock of carbon in their remaining forests. Proceeds would go to local communities.
“We are living on borrowed time,” said the report’s author, Johann Eliasch, a Swedish multimillionaire businessman and deforestation campaigner who was appointed as the Prime Minister’s special representative on deforestation and clean energy last year. “Deforestation will continue as long as cutting down trees is more economic than preserving them.”
Rainforest destruction is a key contributor to global warming, accounting for one fifth of carbon emissions.
