Science Central blog: 100 questions to save the world

Any strategy to fight climate change that does not make the preservation of the world’s rainforests its priority is doomed to fail, the Prince of Wales warned yesterday.

Because deforestation releases a fifth of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions and tropical rainforests provide a vast carbon sink that absorbs greenhouse gases, action is “an absolute necessity”, he said.

In a speech to the St James’s Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium, which is being held under his patronage, the Prince said that rainforest protection would be critical to addressing food security, energy security and economic security, and was inextricably linked to sustainable economic development.

It must also be a key item on the agenda of the climate change talks to be held in Copenhagen in December, he said.

“Solving climate change is a precondition to ensuring security, and without adequately addressing tropical deforestation we cannot have an answer to climate change,” the Prince said. “It is that simple: saving the rainforests is not an option, it is actually an absolute necessity.”

The Prince said that 20 billion tonnes of water evaporated every day from the forests of the Amazon basin alone. “Deforestation obviously reduces this amount, so decreasing subsequent rainfall in the rainforests, but also, it increasingly appears, changing precipitation patterns across the world and contributing to food shortages.”

Rainfall produced by the Amazon also drives hydroelectric dams, which provide 80 per cent of Brazil’s electricity, so their loss would also make it harder to generate sustainable energy.

The Prince said that the world needed to place an economic value on “ecosystem services” of this sort, particularly those provided by rainforests, to provide stronger incentives for their protection. He added: “I simply cannot understand, in my own simple way, how you can sustain the idea of capitalism, as we have come to know it, without capital — nature’s capital.”

The Prince’s remarks were supported by Lord Stern of Brentford, chairman of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics.

“We cannot separate climate change and deforestation from development,” he said. A third of the world’s tropical forests had been cleared in the past 50 years and an estimated 15 million hectares (55,000 sq miles) were being lost every year.

“We’re losing forest cover each year in the tropics alone to the tune of something like the area of England,” Lord Stern said. “That is just colossal.”

The Prince’s Rainforest Project, a convener of the Nobel symposium, has advocated the idea of rainforest bonds. These would be bought by pension funds and insurance firms to provide a regular return, guaranteed by developed nations, while releasing resources for forest protection schemes.

Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, will tell the symposium today that deforestation is responsible for more emissions than all the world’s cars, lorries, trains and planes. If developed countries decarbonise only themselves, without helping the poorest countries, “then we won’t succeed”.

The symposium, for which The Times is media partner, is organised by the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

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