Armchair army to save the Amazon rainforest

Maurice Chittenden

SPEND a pound and save the rainforest. A conservation group led by a millionaire sports tycoon and a former Labour minister is launching an appeal today to recruit 100,000 green heroes to protect trees in the Amazon.
With less than three weeks to go before the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen, Cool Earth, which has already protected 125,000 acres of rainforest, is hoping armchair guardians will achieve something world leaders cannot agree upon.
As deforestation accounts for 17% of greenhouse gas emissions globally, it wants people to sponsor individual endangered South American trees for as little as £1 each and keep watch over them by means of satellite images. The idea is to “lock in” 3m tons of carbon before the end of the conference on December 18.
The “Tree for a £” campaign has identified 12 species of tree most prized by loggers. Protecting these will help save the biggest “breaths” in the Amazon, the world’s “lungs”. If the mahogany tree, so prized by loggers, is protected, this will also save other trees of low worth that grow near it, as loggers cut down huge swathes of forest just to get to the mahogany and the Andean walnut — used for veneers.

Johan Eliasch, the sports goods tycoon and co-founder of Cool Earth, has earmarked for preservation an area in Peru that is the habitat of jaguars. This area of forest, once controlled by Marxist guerrillas, is now a buffer to protect millions of acres of mahogany-rich land.
“It doesn’t take that much for people to get involved; this is low-cost entry,” Eliasch said.
“The area is now safe. We have not had to deal with guerrillas, but conflict zones such as the Congo have helped to save rainforests because even illegal loggers don’t want to go in. It is an unexpected upside from a deforestation point of view.”
Cool Earth was launched after Frank Field, the former Labour welfare minister, read in The Sunday Times in 2006 about a previous Eliasch initiative in Brazil. “Preserving the trees is one thing we can do to help beat climate change. Government won’t spend money in this area but individuals will. By helping communities protect their part of the rainforest, we build a firewall around even more of the forest because the loggers can’t get through,” Field said.
A Peruvian tribesman said: “Our environment minister wants to protect the trees, but other parts of my government want to exploit the forest.”
For more information go to coolearth.org