From: Independent
At last, the wreck of the rainforests is being tackled. One of the key parts of the Copenhagen climate agreement which the international community will try to construct in December is a comprehensive treaty aiming to reduce deforestation rates in the developing countries by at least 50 per cent by 2020.
Not before time. It has been 20 years since we woke up to the reality of large-scale rainforest loss: in the late 1980s, the terrible scale of destruction in regions such as the Brazilian Amazon, and later, in Indonesia and other areas, dawned on the world, but in the time since then, all we have been able to do, in effect, has been to wring our hands.
Deforestation was clearly terrible for wildlife, for the indigenous peoples of the forests, and for the "ecosystem services", as the modern jargon has it, which forests provide, such as climates which bring rain. But the whole process seemed so vast, the huge socio-economic forces behind deforestation in the developing countries so intractable, that it seemed impossible that anything could be done to stop it or even slow it.