Forestry engineer Andrea García-Guerrero began work on climate issues at Colombia’s Environment Ministry in 2005 when Colombia was losing nearly 2,000 square kilometers (770 sq miles) of woodlands a year to logging, farming and the illegal cocaine trade. Now a top Colombian negotiator to the upcoming United Nations climate-change conference in Cancún, Mexico, she speaks for many of her Latin American colleagues when she argues that the best hope for curbing the continent’s galloping deforestation rate is to establish a mechanism by which rich countries would pay their poorer, rainforest brethren not to cut down trees. Known as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (Redd), such a mechanism has yet to be approved as part of a plan to slow deforestation, a... [Log in to read more]
