from Businessweek:
How do you save a rainforest? Create a national park, hardcore conservationists would say. That isn’t practical, though, if you’re a nation with 45 million acres of rainforest—an area about the size of Washington state—and a per capita income of just over $8,000 a year. “A tree left standing is not valuable to a family who can’t feed their children three square meals a day,” says Pradeepa Bholanath, head of planning and development for the Guyana Forestry Commission. ●With the help of international donors, Guyana, a country of fewer than 750,000 people, is pioneering an approach to protecting the trees that cover more than four-fifths of its surface. To make the rainforest last, it’s using it up slowly. ●Norway signed a deal with Guyana in 2009 offering it as much as $250 million to curb deforestation, and with it, climate change. Trees are one of the world’s oldest and best carbon-capture technologies; they absorb carbon dioxide from the air, store the carbon in wood, and release oxygen. The money paid for, among other things, scientists from Winrock International to assist the Guyana Forestry Commission in developing a system for measuring the quantity of carbon stored by the country’s forest. Having carried out an inventory of its trees, the commission can now make educated decisions about which ones can be cut down without imperiling the health of the entire ecosystem. Guyana’s annual rate of deforestation has dropped to 0.048%, one of the lowest figures in South America and well below the 0.275% average for tropical countries.
