Amazon rainforest: can the Redd plan save it?
Updated on 03 December 2009
While controversies grow over the Copenhagen process concerns grow too over some of its main areas of contention, including an ambitious plan to save the Amazon rainforest.
The Redd (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) plan will be on the table in Copenhagen and it could yet save the planet.
Its details are complex as it involves rich countries paying countries with lots of rainforest not to cut down trees.
Deforestation accounts for one fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions and halting it would be as powerful a way to slow climate change as closing all the world's coal-fired power plants.
Channel 4 News has been to the heart of the world's biggest remaining rainforest, the Amazon, to find out realistic the Redd plan is on the ground.
For two weeks, foreign affairs correspondent Jonathan Miller travelled through the states of Amazonas (where he met illegal loggers, gold-miners and ranchers), Mato Grosso (to meet native Indians of the Parecis tribe) and Rondonia (where he joined the Amazon's airbourne enforcement police), to see for himself the extent of the destruction and the challenges of making Redd work.
He travelled 2,000 miles across the Amazon Basin, which contains more than half the world’s remaining rainforest, to ask Brazil’s Amazon pioneers what they make of this plan.
Could they be enticed to treat this forest as the global resource we like to think it is? And, who among the Amazon's 30 million people, stands to gain?
Its success will hinge on wealthy countries convincing Amazonians that money really can grow on trees and that they'd literally be better off leaving their forest intact.
But in the past, logging has simply been too profitable.
Can the REDD plan work?
Read Jonathan Miller's blog on the Amazonian Chainsaw Massacre.
