By MICHAEL CASEY for AP

When it comes to greenhouse gases, the public tends to focus on smokestacks and exhaust fumes. But deforestation, the burning or rotting of trees, is thought to account for up to 20 percent of carbon dioxide sent into the atmosphere — as much as all the world’s cars, trucks, trains, planes and ships combined.

The draft plan worked out at negotiations in Bangkok and elsewhere is called REDD, for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation. It calls for halving deforestation rates by 2020 in poor nations and ending it completely by 2030.

It would be financed either by richer nations’ taxpayers or by a carbon-trading mechanism — a system in which each country would have an emissions ceiling, and those who undershoot it can sell their remainder to over-polluters. Under carbon trading, the rich countries would pay the poor ones to keep their forests intact, and earn new carbon credits to cover their own emissions.

Policymakers see forest conservation as a cheap and easy way to start tackling global warming. It could end up reducing by 50 percent the cost of halving carbon emissions from 1990 levels by 2030, according to the Eliasch Review, a report sponsored by the British government.

Decades of international efforts and vast sums of money have done little to save the forests.

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