Land use change

In Brazil’s Amazon basin, farmers have long sought out a special form of fertiliser – a locally sourced compost-like substance prized for its amazing qualities of reviving poor or exhausted soils. They buy it in sacks or dig it out of the earth from patches that are sometimes as much as 6ft deep. Spread on fields, it retains its fertile qualities for long periods.

As they do every year, Greenpeace and nongovernmental organizations like “Eyes on the Forest,” which is supported by the WWF and other western environmental groups, have squarely blamed the plantation industry for the seasonal fires in Sumatra.

This generates sympathy for the anti-forestry campaign NGOs have been waging in Indonesia for many years, which pits economic development against the environment.

But this perspective is simplistic and wrong.

While committed to stopping deforestation, Brazil sees a carbon trading scheme as the wrong way to proceed. On climate change mitigation, it wants commitments to reflect historic emissions.A scheme that would allow developed nations to gain carbon credits by supporting forest conservation is on the agenda of the UN conference in Copenhagen this December, but the home country of the Amazon, the world’s largest forest, now turns its thumb down.

LONDON/NUSA DUA, Indonesia (Reuters) - It could save the rainforests of Borneo, slow climate change and the international community backs it. But a plan to pay tropical countries not to chop down trees risks being discredited by opportunists even before it starts.