WHEN millionaire businessman Johan Eliasch decides to head for his country estate, it involves a slightly longer trek than a drive to the Cotswolds.

After leaving his office in London’s Mayfair, it is a 12-hour journey by air and road before he can view his 400,000-acre plot in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. The estate is the size of Greater London.

Eliasch, 43, a banker, film producer and chief executive of the Head sports equipment company, has bought it from a logging company to protect the plants and wildlife. He sees himself as a pioneer on the new frontier of climate change.

Eliasch, who is also deputy treasurer of the Conservative party, is part of a growing trend towards “green colonialism”.

Rich people with chequebooks instead of pith helmets, charities and trusts are buying vast swathes of the Third World or “renting” the timber rights to stop trees being cut down. It is a breakaway from the methods that have characterised the international conservation movement for the past 50 years.

The traditional approach relied on agencies and charities cajoling governments in developing countries to set aside state-owned land to create national parks and nature reserves. Now individuals and organisations are taking direct responsibility for the land.

Eliasch, who is valued at £355m in The Sunday Times Rich List, is believed to have paid about £8m for his jungle park in Brazil. He plans to visit again next month.

“The Amazon is the lung of the world,” he said last week. “It provides 20% of the world’s oxygen and 30% of the fresh water.” He is now lobbying insurance companies to follow his lead with billions of dollars of their own money.

“In theory you can perhaps buy the Amazon for $50 billion [£28.5 billion],” he said. “It would be a very quick payback because a hurricane like Katrina will cost them a similar amount in payouts.

“You can plot a direct correlation between cutting down trees which absorb carbon dioxide and the global warming and extreme conditions which lead to hurricanes like Katrina.”

He is campaigning for conservationists like himself to be given carbon credits for preserving trees, similar to the financial grants made to timber companies to plant saplings after they have cut down acres of forest. He will use any such money to buy more forest.

Eliasch, the son of a Swedish industrialist, has invited scientists to search his segment of the Amazon for wildlife and plants that may have beneficial extracts for medicine.

His estate lies 1,600 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro. It is just north of the Madeira river, an Amazon tributary, where dolphins swim alongside piranhas. Two species of squirrel-sized marmoset monkeys were discovered in the region six years ago. “The biodiversity is amazing,” said Eliasch.

Across the Atlantic, Paul van Vlissingen, 65, the owner of Calor Gas who is worth £1.1 billion and owns an 81,000-acre estate in Ross-shire, has spent £15m buying or leasing land in four African countries to preserve as wildlife parks.

Van Vlissingen, who is terminally ill, said in a statement earlier this year: “There is so much more to be done if the great natural museums of Africa are to be saved and restored.”

Bill Adams, a professor of conservation at Cambridge University, said: “It is an interesting development. If there is an ethical motive for buying the land, it is likely to be effective.

“But I do not know about encouraging insurance companies to buy up the rainforest. I don’t think their business managers will go for that.”

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