Until recently, Michael Somare, the prime minister of Papua New Guinea, felt that global economic forces were pressuring him to cut down his country's lush tropical rain forest, the third-largest left in the world.
But Somare believes he has found a financial incentive to save his nation's forests, one that should be far more valuable to the world than hardwood timber or coffee plantations. Forests serve as natural air filters that suck up the greenhouse gases that are causing global warming.
Arguing that the rest of the world is benefiting from this natural wealth without sharing the cost, a bloc of developing countries led by Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica plans to make a novel proposition this week at a United Nations conference in Montreal on climate change: Pay us, and we will preserve our rain forests.
"In the rural areas of my nation, where 80% of the people live, the only real options for economic growth often require the destruction of natural forests ... in order to trade low-value commodities with the industrial powers. I call this eco-colonialism," Somare said in an interview last week.
"This is a recipe for failure -- failure to preserve our biodiversity, pressure to release our people from poverty, failure to protect the world from the greenhouse effect," he added. "We need to develop a system that will monetize environmental services and capitalize sustainable development."
The proposal is preliminary, and some experts predict it will be bedeviled by the challenge of determining a fair-market value for nature, as well as international skepticism over whether nations such as Papua New Guinea can successfully shield their forests from illegal logging.
But the idea, which has begun to garner backing from prominent economists, could get more countries interested in joining a new worldwide pact to combat global warming once the current U.N. treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, expires in 2012.
"Right now, these rain forest nations are providing enormous environmental services to the rest of the world -- biodiversity, reduced greenhouse gas emissions -- and they are not being compensated," said Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, one of a group of academics at Columbia University championing the proposal. "From the viewpoint of global economic efficiency, the best use for rain forests is to maintain them as rain forests."
