MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Norway pledges one billion USD to protect Amazon rainforest

Norway has pledged one billion US dollars by 2015 to preserve the Brazilian Amazon rain forest, as long as South America's largest nation keeps trying to stop deforestation, visiting Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg announced in Brasilia.

The promised donation is the first to a new Amazon preservation fund Brazilian officials hope will raise 21 billion US dollars to protect nature reserves, to persuade loggers and farmers to stop destroying trees and to finance scientific and technological projects. "Efforts against deforestation may give us the largest, quickest and cheapest reductions in greenhouse gas emissions" Stoltenberg told reporters. "Brazilian efforts against deforestation are therefore of vital importance if we shall succeed in our campaign against global warming". Amazon trees are felled by loggers or burned in bulk, releasing an estimated 400 million tons of carbon dioxide, 80% of Brazil's greenhouse gases, into the atmosphere every year and making the country one of the world's top sources of emissions. Brazil slowed Amazon jungle clearing between 2005 and 2007, but environmentalists are concerned the trend may now reverse itself as more trees are cut to make way for cattle ranches and soy plantations that soaring world food prices have made more profitable. Under the pledge Norway will give Brazil 21 million dollars this year and 210 million in 2009 but plans to donate the full one billion only when "we are able to see a clear documentation that deforestation is being reduced," Stoltenberg said. He added that Norway will use Brazil's annual statistics on deforestation to determine how much money to release, although Norway plans to develop better systems to track deforestation, a task now complicated by clouds that hang over the jungle. "The day that every developed country has the same attitude as Norway, we'll certainly begin to trust that global warming can be diminished" said Brazilian President Lula da Silva during the ceremony at the Planalto government palace. Environment Minister Carlos Minc said Japan, Sweden, Germany, South Korea and Switzerland are considering donations to the fund launched last August by decree. The donations will be key crucial for a new development model for the impoverished Amazon region, which covers nearly 60% of Brazil, Minc added. According to the Brazilian environmental group Imazon, every minute the Amazon forest loses the equivalent of one-and-a-half football fields. About 20% of the forest, which covers an area larger than Western Europe, has been destroyed.