Prince Charles' rainforest campaign

1 month ago 16th May 14:00

Britain's Prince Charles is campaigning against the continued logging of rainforests.

The prince is calling for a mechanism to be devised to pay poor countries and stop them felling their forests.

Charles told the BBC: "When you think [rainforests] release 20 billion tonnes of water vapour into the air every day, and also absorb carbon on a gigantic scale, they are incredibly valuable, and they provide the rainfall we all depend on."

Describing the forests as the world's "air conditioning" the prince continued: "The trouble is the rainforests are home to something like 1.4 billion of the poorest people in the world. In order to survive there has to be an effort to produce things which tends to be at the expense of the rainforest. What we've got to do is try to ensure that those forests are more valuable alive than dead. At the moment there's more value in them being dead. This is the crazy thing."

Describing the forests as the world's

The prince is calling on governments, corporations and regular people in the developed world to demand the logging stop.

At a recent environmental summit in Bali developing countries asked richer nations to compensate them to stop them using the rainforests to produce timber, food and bio fuels. Talks are continuing, but the issue is a very difficult area in determining who pays for what and how much compensation should be given to developing nations.