Crisis centreClimate change

The planet's temperature is rising at an accelerated pace that most scientists say is due to man-made factors. They predict global warming will lead to rising sea levels and more extreme weather, including droughts, floods and storms.

Growing weather and climate hazards increase the risk of disasters and threaten food and water supplies across the world - especially in the poorest countries. Whole communities could be forced to find new homes as their living environments are submerged or can no longer sustain them.

• Numbers affected by climate disasters expected to keep rising
• World's poor - the most vulnerable - need help to adapt
• Negotiations on a new global climate pact have made little progress

Statistics from the International Disaster Database show a steep rise in weather-related disasters since the middle of the 20th century, and the number of people affected is also increasing.

The U.N.'s climate panel says the world can expect more heatwaves and droughts, heavier rains, stronger storms and rising sea levels due to global warming caused by emissions of greenhouse gases.

Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia - where the climate is already more extreme and arid regions are common - are likely to be most affected as rainfall becomes less predictable and glaciers melt.

In coastal areas and small island states, tens of millions of people could be uprooted as their living environments are submerged, or food and water become scarce. Human, plant and animal diseases are also expected to spread to new places as the planet warms.

There is growing concern about the potential impact of climate change on local, regional and global security. Experts warn there is a higher risk of violence in places where tensions triggered by the environmental impacts of climate change add to existing stresses.

There is intense debate and a wide range of competing ideas on how best to keep global warming in check, and help people cope with its impacts.

Many developing countries believe richer nations should make greater commitments to reduce their carbon emissions, and provide additional funding to help poor states adjust to the effects of climate change and find less carbon-intensive ways to develop. Wealthy countries want fast-developing nations to agree to curb their rising emissions.

More than 190 countries have agreed to negotiate a new pact to replace or extend the Kyoto Protocol, which binds rich nations - except the United States - to cap emissions of greenhouse gases until 2012.

But hopes of a deal at the 2009 U.N. summit in Copenhagen were dashed, and the meeting ended with a non-binding accord which aims to limit temperature increases and mobilise finance to help poorer nations tackle climate change. Negotiations continue to inch forward towards a legally binding pact, as governments wrangle over the size of emissions reductions.

Humanitarian and development agencies have woken up to the impact of climate change on their projects and the communities where they work. Increasingly, they are helping local people become more resilient to weather disasters and shifting climate patterns.

The planet's temperature is rising at an accelerated pace that most scientists say is due to man-made factors. They predict global warming will lead to rising sea levels and more extreme weather, including droughts, floods and storms.

Growing weather and climate hazards increase the risk of disasters and threaten food and water supplies across the world - especially in the poorest countries. Whole communities could be forced to find new homes as their environments are submerged or no longer able to sustain them.

There's intense debate and a wide range of competing ideas on how to tackle what could be the most important issue of our time.

Global temperatures have risen by about 0.75 degrees Celsius in the past 100 years, and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says they are probably going to increase by between 1.8 and 4 degrees (3.2-7.2F) before the end of the century.

There isn't complete agreement on why the planet is getting warmer. But after examining the scientific evidence, the IPCC concluded there was at least a 90 percent probability it was primarily due to man-made factors.

"Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations," it said in a benchmark 2007 report.

Rising emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere trap heat, leading to global warming.

The IPCC also said there's a greater than 90 percent chance there will be more heat waves and "heavy rain events" this century, and a greater than 66 percent chance that more areas will be hit by drought and that tropical storms will be more intense.

As the world heats up and glaciers melt, oceans are rising too. The U.N. climate panel said in 2007 that sea levels would rise between 18 and 59 cm (7.2 to 23.6 inches) this century because of global warming. But a group of 26 scientists warned in 2009 the global sea level could rise by 1 to 2 metres by 2100 as climate change accelerates more quickly than anticipated.

The IPCC says the areas of the world most vulnerable to climate change are Africa, Asia's mega-deltas and small island states like Tuvalu, in the south Pacific.

From a humanitarian perspective, the main issue is how projected changes in climate and weather events could impact on populations already made vulnerable by poverty, hunger, disease, conflict and poor governance.

Estimates of the number of people who could be affected remain speculative and hotly disputed.

A 2009 report from the now-defunct Global Humanitarian Forum (GHF) calculated that climate change already kills about 315,000 people a year through hunger, sickness and weather disasters, and the annual death toll is expected to rise to half a million by 2030.

It said climate change seriously affects 325 million people every year, a figure that will more than double in 20 years to an estimated 660 million. But the methodology of that report has been widely questioned.

In the same year, aid agency Oxfam issued a report predicting that climate-related disasters will hit more than 375 million people each year by 2015, up from nearly 250 million now.

Most humanitarian experts do agree, however, that climate change is adding to the pressures on the world's poorest communities and poses a major challenge to the work of relief and development agencies.

Controversies

From a historical perspective, it's often argued that rich industrialised nations - which have contributed the most to global warming through high emissions of greenhouse gases per person - have a responsibility to help the least developed countries adjust to the coming changes and find a cleaner development path themselves, as they are likely to suffer the most from climate change even though they have done the least to cause it.

And yet U.N. talks to craft a new global deal to tackle global warming - which would extend or replace the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012 - are inching forward at a snail's pace.

There had been high hopes the world's governments could reach a legally binding agreement at a 2009 summit in Copenhagen, but that meeting produced only a voluntary accord on limiting temperature rises to 2 degrees Celsius and providing finance to help poorer nations cope with climate change.

In 2010, the U.N. negotiating process was largely stalled over the size of emissions cuts pledged by rich nations, a lack of progress on how to verify emissions reductions by poor nations, and a general lack of trust.

The climate change community also had to deal with the fallout from a series of leaked research emails, released on the internet just before the 2009 U.N. climate summit, which sceptics leaped on as evidence scientists had exaggerated or lied about man's role in global warming.

Researchers at the University of East Anglia, in eastern England, said the emails, which covered a period of 13 years and were written by more than 160 authors, were taken out of context to boost arguments by climate sceptics that climate change is a hoax.

They were cleared of exaggerating the effects of global warming by an inquiry headed by former civil servant Muir Russell, but the investigation did criticise the scientists for their lack of openness and said some of their data was misleading.

The IPCC was also accused of insufficiently rigorous procedures in producing its flagship reports, after it admitted to claiming mistakenly there was a very high chance the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035, in addition to making some additional small errors in its reports.

In mid-2010, an independent review of how the U.N. climate panel works said it should make predictions only when it has solid evidence and should avoid policy advocacy. The InterAcademy Council also called for shorter limits on terms for top IPCC officials and the establishment of an executive committee with outside members.

The difference between climate and weather

While climate statistics normally focus on averages, people tend to be most interested in extreme weather events, including super-strength storms and long spells of abnormal weather like severe winters and hot summers, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

Weather refers to what is happening to the atmosphere at a given time - usually on a daily or weekly basis. Climate is a measure of what to expect in any month, season or year, and is based on statistics built up over a longer period.

Scientists and weather experts often use the term "climate variability", which is different from "climate change".

According to the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), climate variability refers to "variations of the climate system, which includes oceans and the land surface as well as the atmosphere, over months, years and decades" - not all of which can be predicted.

Climate change, in comparison, refers to "longer-term trends in average temperature or rainfall or in climate variability itself, and often to trends resulting wholly or in part from human activities, notably global warming due to the burning of fossil fuels".

Inevitably, there's a high degree of uncertainty in long-term predictions. Yet many climate and development specialists believe that, by learning how to manage climate variability from season to season and year to year, communities will be better equipped to adapt to climate change in the future. This requires well-designed policies, as well as access to high-quality data and information about climate at the local level.

In Africa - which is highly vulnerable to climate change in part because of its dependency on agriculture - farmers often lose crops because they can't get hold of accurate and timely forecasts.

More natural disasters

There has been a steep rise in hydro-meteorological disasters - which include floods, wave surges, storms, droughts and landslides - since the middle of the 20th century, according to statistics from the International Disaster Database managed by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) at Belgium's Louvain University.

Because the pattern of weather-related disasters varies sharply from year to year, it is best to look at longer-term trends.

In the period from 1900 to 1909, 28 disasters were recorded in this category. Between 1950 and 1959, there were 232. And in the 1990s, there were 2,034. During the first five years of this century alone, there were 2,135.

However, CRED researchers caution that the increase in natural disasters isn't all down to global warming. "Climate change is probably an actor in this increase but not the major one," says their report on statistics for 2007. Other reasons for the rise are that information about natural disasters is more accurate and widely available than in the past, and that populations have grown.

According to the 2008 Red Cross World Disasters Report, over the decade from 1998 to 2007, hydro-meteorological disasters accounted for 98 percent of the 2.8 billion people affected by disasters around the world, with floods affecting 45 percent and droughts 39 percent.

"Climate change is leading to an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, like cyclones, droughts and floods across much of our globe," said Madeleen Helmer, head of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.

Aid agency Oxfam said in a 2007 report that weather-related disasters have quadrupled over the last two decades, highlighting the rise in small- and medium-scale disasters as a particularly worrying trend.

And the charity warned in 2009 that the world's relief agencies will be overwhelmed by a sharp rise in the number of people affected by climate-related disasters by 2015 unless the quantity and quality of aid improves.

Such crises are projected to affect more than 375 million people each year by 2015, up from nearly 250 million now, the report said.

The growth in mega-cities is also increasing the risk of disasters in densely populated urban environments - a challenge for which aid agencies are poorly prepared.

For the first time in history, half the world's 6.7 billion people live in urban areas, according to the United Nations.

Rapid urbanisation, combined with climate change, is boosting the chances of a mega-disaster that would dwarf anything the world has seen before. Six of the world's 10 most populous cities are on or near the coast, leaving millions vulnerable to flooding, storm surges and post-quake tsunamis.

Mumbai in India, Mexico City, Colombia's capital Bogota, China's Shanghai, Manila in the Philippines, Lagos in Nigeria and the Indonesian city of Jakarta are just some of the places of particular concern to disaster experts.

One-tenth of the global population - 634 million people - live in risky coastal areas less than 10 metres above sea level, and that number is rising, according to a 2007 study by academics at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and New York's City and Columbia universities.

Food and water shortages

Aid agencies are concerned that a rise in climate-related disasters will tip a growing number of poor people who already live on the edge of survival into crisis.

Scientists expect spreading deserts and the degradation of farm land linked to climate change and environmental exploitation to pose a serious threat to food supplies for the world's surging population in coming years.

Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia - where the climate is already more extreme and arid regions are common - are likely to be most affected as rainfall declines in some areas and its timing becomes less predictable, making water scarcer.

In some regions, the expansion of deserts and salt intrusion into once arable land is already well under way. In the future, this phenomenon is likely to be most widespread in drier areas of Latin America, including in farming-giant Brazil.

In Africa, increasing climate variability is expected to create major problems for poor farmers in rural areas, who are likely to see their growing seasons get shorter and crop yields cut, especially in areas near already arid and semi-arid regions.

The IPCC says that between 90 million and 220 million Africans could find their water sources at risk from climate change by 2020. Experts say climate risks are particularly high on that continent because of the additional stresses and challenges it faces, including conflicts and corruption.

In Asia, global warming is expected to cause large areas of glaciers in the Himalayas and surrounding highlands to disappear, threatening water supplies and livelihoods across much of the continent. Rising temperatures have already shrunk glaciers on the mountains dividing China and South Asia.

Accelerated melting could severely disrupt river flows, rainfall patterns and farming across Asia, because glaciers in the Himalayas and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau are a major source of rivers like the Yangtze in China, the Mekong in Indochina and the Ganges in India. Glacier-fed rivers could swell as the ice melts, but then dry out as the ice disappears.

Warmer, wetter or drier conditions in some parts of the world are also expected to expand the range of agricultural pests, bringing new threats to crops.

Conflict and displacement

Humanitarians fear that food and water shortages stoked by climate change and environmental damage could create or exacerbate tensions between communities, which may spill over into violent conflict.

The threat to world security garnered growing attention in 2007, when U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned that environmental changes caused by global warming "are likely to become a major driver of war and conflict", and climate change was debated at the Security Council for the first time.

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to the IPCC and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore that year "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change".

Some experts argue that climate change and its impacts alone are unlikely to spark conflict directly, but will add to tensions in already unstable areas.

Flooding, sea level rises and land degradation could also force people from their homes, creating tens of millions of climate change migrants. But there is no single authoritative prediction about the numbers of people who could lose their homes and land because of global warming.

The U.N. refugee agency has warned that the impacts of climate change could uproot around six million people each year, half of them because of weather disasters like floods and storms.

And UK-based development agency Christian Aid has said 250 million people could be displaced by 2050, a figure based on an updated estimate from scientist Norman Myers, who suggested in 1995 that between 150 and 200 million people would have to permanently leave their homes because of climate change.

The U.N.'s State of the World's Cities 2008/2009 report noted that 3,351 of the world's cities are located less than 10 metres above sea level, putting nearly 400 million people at risk of displacement from rising sea levels.

Most experts agree that much of the displacement caused by global warming is likely to be within countries, and is unlikely to cause a major flow of climate refugees from poor to rich countries.

For those who do cross national borders, however, it is still unclear who should help them. Climate refugees do not have the same protection under international law as those who flee their countries to escape violence.

AlertNet has a tipsheet on displacement driven by environmental and climate factors.

New health threats

Global warming is likely to lead to shifting patterns of disease, bringing new health hazards for millions.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says public health depends largely on safe drinking water, sufficient food, secure shelter and good social conditions - all of which are likely to be affected by a changing global climate.

Scientists and health experts are working to gather more data and evidence on how climate change affects diseases and other aspects of health. Statistics are hard to come by.

A WHO assessment concluded that the effects of climate change since the mid-1970s may have caused over 150,000 deaths in 2000, noting that these impacts are likely to increase in the future.

On the positive side, global warming could bring limited local benefits, such as fewer winter deaths in temperate climates and increased food production in high-latitude regions.

In 2008, the WHO warned climate change would exacerbate health crises in many poor countries already strained by inadequate hospitals, too few medical staff and uneven access to drugs.

The WHO says confronting the health challenges from global warming requires greater efforts to forecast changing weather patterns, fight mosquitoes and other disease-spreading bugs, distribute vaccinations and make health services available to more people.

International action on global warming

International, national and local-level activities to tackle climate change fall into two main categories: mitigation and adaptation.

Mitigation is concerned with curbing greenhouse gas emissions and finding cleaner ways of powering the world. Adaptation assesses the vulnerability of societies and natural systems to the consequences - negative and positive - of climate change, and helps people adjust to those effects.

Greenhouse gas emissions have risen by 70 percent since 1970, and are expected to rise by between 25 percent and 90 percent over the next 25 years if the world continues with "business as usual".

The IPCC says rich nations need to cut emissions by 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to keep temperatures below what many regard as a "dangerous" 2 degree Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) rise.

IPCC scientists said in 2007 that growth in greenhouse gas emissions could be curbed at reasonable cost to the world through policies like switching to renewable energy sources, reducing deforestation and improving energy efficiency.

At a major meeting in Bali that year, nearly 200 nations agreed to launch negotiations on a new pact to replace or extend the Kyoto Protocol, which binds 37 rich nations to capping their emissions of greenhouse gases until 2012.

The agreement does not include the United States, the world's second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, after its Senate refused to approve the treaty.

The election of U.S. President Barack Obama in Nov. 2008 boosted hopes for a new global deal that would for the first time require the United States to reduce emissions and introduce curbs for major developing country emitters including China and India.

Some of the world's fastest-growing economies, with the largest populations - like China and India - are increasingly responsible for carbon emissions. But they have been reluctant to make promises on limiting them without seeing more decisive steps from wealthier industrialised nations first.

High expectations were dashed at the Copenhagen U.N. climate summit in December 2009, which failed to produce a legally binding treaty - both because the United States had not yet passed domestic legislation allowing it to make international commitments on emissions cuts, and because other key nations, including China, appeared to try to block an agreement, fearing it could slow their economic growth.

Instead, the talks ended with the "Copenhagen Accord", a last-minute U.S.-brokered agreement with China, India, Brazil and South Africa that set no legally binding targets for cutting emissions, but did call for them to be reduced in order to keep temperature increases from climate change below 2 degrees Celsius.

Since backed by some 130 nations, the pact also commits rich countries to provide climate funding for poorer nations of $30 billion by 2012, rising to $100 billion each year from 2020.

Proponents called it a first step toward a binding formal agreement, which they had hoped could be sealed at climate negotiations in Mexico City in November-December 2010.

But talks have become bogged down in an atmosphere of mistrust as negotiators wrangle over the size of emissions reductions by rich nations and how to measure cuts by developing countries, leading some to doubt whether an agreement can even be reached in South Africa in 2011.

Outside the U.N. process, at a summit in Italy in mid-2009, G8 nations set a goal of cutting their overall emissions by 80 percent by 2050. But the world's leading economic powers failed to persuade developing countries to sign up for a global target of halving world emissions by 2050.

Poorer nations first want rich states to specify interim targets for 2020 on the way to a mid-century goal, and are calling for emissions cuts of 40 percent or more from 1990 levels by 2020.

So far the European Union has promised to reduce emissions by at least 20 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels, and U.S President Obama aims to cut U.S. emissions back to 1990 levels by the same deadline. Japan has announced a 2020 reduction target of 25 percent from 1990 levels.

Adapting to climate change

While negotiations on emissions cuts are essential to limit global warming in the future, aid workers say vulnerable communities need support to adapt to the extreme weather and climate shifts that are already happening.

Protecting people from the damaging consequences of weather hazards and longer-term climate change includes sophisticated measures like climate modelling and switching to more appropriate crops like drought-tolerant maize. Or it can be as simple as alerting people to coming storms, teaching them to swim or storing food on higher shelves.

Governments are increasingly recognising the need to strengthen their capacity to prepare for and manage climate-related risks, and are taking measures to help people adapt to climate change.

Adaptation policies include:

• Better analysis and use of data and forecasting to give the public early warning
• Physical barriers, such as better flood defences
• Financial buffers, such as cash transfers and weather-related insurance
• Improved health and sanitation systems
• Helping communities develop alternative livelihoods, or in extreme cases, move to more hospitable environments
• Supporting a more pro-active international relief and response system

Disaster experts are also devising ways to ensure that important weather and climate information filters down to those most affected, as well as analysing communities' own views of the hazards they face. Local knowledge can be valuable in avoiding disasters, but has often been overlooked by scientists and aid agencies.

In recent years, most relief and development agencies have begun thinking about how to address the potential impacts of climate change when planning humanitarian and development work.

This isn't just a question of identifying and reducing the risks to their own projects and other assets ("climate proofing"), but also involves encouraging the communities they assist to follow a low-carbon development path by adopting renewable energy and other strategies for greener growth.

Climate finance for developing countries

It's now widely recognised that developing countries need substantial financial support to cope with climate change and develop in a cleaner way than industrialised nations. But the issue of who should pay for the technology, infrastructure and new institutions required remains controversial.

International funds and schemes, like the U.N. Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), have been established to channel money to renewable energy initiatives in developing countries.

The CDM allocates carbon credits to projects that cut greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries, such as wind farms and hydro-power projects, which are then sold to investors, or to companies and nations that want to offset their own pollution.

A 2 percent levy on CDM transactions goes into the U.N. Adaptation Fund, which was set up to help poorer nations adapt to global warming.

The size of that fund is expected to increase from around $80 million in 2009 to around $300 million per year by 2012, although this amount depends on fluctuations in carbon prices.

Yet it is a paltry sum compared with calls from developing countries, the United Nations and aid groups for tens of billions of dollars per year in new financing for climate change adaptation.

Experts agree there is overlap between development activities and measures needed to help poor countries become more resilient to climate change. But it also requires more and bigger interventions, such as building sea walls and protecting roads from flash floods.

A 2009 study from the World Bank puts the costs of adapting to climate change in developing countries at $75 billion to $100 billion per year up to 2050.

The 2009 Copenhagen Accord, now backed by around two-thirds of the world's nations, commits wealthy nations to providing $30 billion in "fast start" finance for tackling climate change in developing countries by 2012, rising to $100 billion a year by 2020 of public and private funding, including "alternative sources of finance".

As of August 2010, Reuters calculations showed that aid promises from rich nations - including money to protect forests - had come close to the $30 billion goal agreed in Copenhagen, but analysts said much of that was old funding dressed up as new pledges.

It is generally accepted that rich governments cannot find the promised sums from their public coffers alone, and that new ways of raising money will have to be found, including potentially taxes on international emissions trading, aviation, shipping and even financial transactions.

Other market-based ideas for protecting countries, communities and individuals against climate and disaster risk range from catastrophe bonds to micro-insurance and disaster derivatives.

The U.N. Secretary-General has set up a high-level panel of international experts to study how best to mobilise longer-term climate finance. That panel is due to submit a final report by November 2010.

The 2008 launch of two big World Bank climate investment funds - to help developing countries introduce low carbon technologies and adapt to climate change - sparked rows over who should control the money, and whether it should be provided as loans or grants.

Both vulnerable countries and aid groups insist that funding to tackle climate change must be in addition to development aid, and poorer countries must be given a fair say in how the money is spent.

The world's least-developed countries say they need immediate financing of up to $2 billion to pay for urgent measures they have already identified in their national adaptation plans of action (NAPAs). But with only several hundred million dollars available for these so far, a trust gap persists between rich and poor nations over the perceived lack of fresh funding to help vulnerable states.

Reducing emissions from deforestation (redd)

Deforestation and forest degradation contribute nearly 20 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions - more than all the world's cars, trucks, trains and airplanes put together, and second only to the energy sector.

Environmental groups say protecting tropical forests from cutting and burning is the quickest and most direct way to mitigate some of the impact of climate change - a practice known as "avoided deforestation".

Increased logging in the Amazon, and in parts of Asia and Africa, has raised concern because it reduces the world's capacity to store carbon. Trees also act as a natural defence against soil erosion, flooding and landslides, and cutting them down can increase the risk of disasters.

Moreover, opponents of commercial logging argue that much of it is planned and carried out with little respect for the rights of indigenous and other minority groups who rely on forests for their livelihoods and survival.

Countries with large areas of rainforest - including Brazil, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Costa Rica, Gabon, Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea - want compensation for the economic losses they would incur by limiting logging.

At international level, progress has been made on an international U.N.-backed scheme called "reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation" (REDD), which aims to develop a global market in carbon credits derived from preserving and improving forests.

REDD aims to reward developing countries that save, protect and rehabilitate forests through large-scale projects. Poorer nations and local forest communities are meant to receive a major share of funds raised by the sale of the carbon credits to rich nations, which can use them to meet mandated emission reduction targets.

REDD is not yet formally part of a broader U.N. climate pact, and potential buyers of the credits have been waiting for an approved global standard for forest carbon credits to ensure the reductions are real and verifiable.

In mid-2010, the process got a boost when Indonesia's Rimba Raya conservation project - covering nearly 100,000 ha (250,000 acres) of carbon-rich peat swamp forest in Central Kalimantan province on Borneo island - earned the first-ever approval of an accounting method for measuring the reduction in carbon emissions under REDD.

The future sale of carbon offsets from the 30-year project, worth around $750 million, is expected to help boost the livelihoods of more than 11,000 people in the area and save rare species including orang-utans and other primates.

An enhanced version of the U.N.-REDD programme known as "REDD+", which is being developed by a number of institutions, also includes the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks.

The United Nations says financial flows for greenhouse gas emission reductions from REDD+ could reach up to $30 billion a year.

As of mid-2010, developed countries had promised more than $3.5 billion to a fund to support REDD+ activities.

Other initiatives include a World Bank financing and capacity-building mechanism called the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility which pays developing countries to protect and replant tropical forests. By creating economic value for forests, it aims to help developing countries generate new revenue for poverty alleviation while maintaining the forests' natural benefits such as fresh water, food and medicines.

Indonesia is also getting some international financial help to preserve and restore peatlands that were drained in a scheme to create rice fields. The dense tropical swamps release large amounts of greenhouse gases when burned or drained to plant crops, including palm oil for biofuels.