Rainforests are some of the most diverse habitats on earth, they cover only 2% of the land surface of the world but have 50% of the earth's plants and animals. Rainforests are already shrinking fast originally 6 million square miles of tropical rainforest existed worldwide. As a result of deforestation, only 2.6 million remain, this is a huge loss of habitat that is continuing rapidly. Moreover such forests are not unproductive, they have many plants that are used in medicines. For example more than 2,000 tropical forest plants have been identified by scientists as having anti-cancer properties.

The rainforests absorb more than half the CO2 emissions that are absorbed on land, or more than a quarter of all CO2 that is taken out of the atmosphere. “To get an idea of the value of the sink, the removal of nearly five billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by intact tropical forest, based on realistic prices for a tonne of carbon, should be valued at around 13 billion pounds per year. This is a compelling argument for conserving tropical forests.”^[1]

1. ^ http://en.cop15.dk/news/view+news?newsid=758

The rainforest is currently used as a resource by investors for creating farmland and for logging, this can make them a lot of money, even if it is not always legal. There needs to be some alternative way of making money for investors to persuade them to invest in doing nothing with (or conserving) the rainforest. This can come in the form of the carbon credits from the CO2 the forest you own soaks up.

This means that if the price of carbon is set too low or drops too low the investors are likely to go back to more lucrative logging, you cant rely on capitalism to protect the rainforests.

Conserving the rainforests preserves lifes in the long term as climate change will have less of an impact overall if we reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

The G77 countries believe that the money being offered for adaptation at the moment is way to little, so this would be better spent adding to the adaptation fund so that it can be used to protect lives not trees.

Turing rainforests into farmland is counterproductive, the rainforests are already productive in other ways, there are other places in the world where we can grow food, wecan't simply relocate a rainforest to somewhere that is more convenient. R ainforest cultivation produces wealth for a few and only for a short time because the soil is exhausted by the time it has produced three or four crops.

The rainforest is often not being destroyed for no reason. Many farmers destroy the rainforest so that they can live and many more are simply using the land so that they can produce more food to meet the demands of an expanding world population. With climate change many areas of the world will become less productive in their food productionso new areas need to be found.