PARIS — Rich nations must contribute more to a climate change fund and help fight deforestation, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said in opening a conference Thursday on saving the world's forests — a key defense against global warming.
Ministers from some 40 nations were attending the one-day Paris meeting, including Indonesia and other heavily wooded countries in the Amazon and Congo river basins.
Efforts to halt deforestation, one of the culprits in climate change, have been bogged along with the wider goal of reaching a legally binding global agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions while helping poor nations adapt to and cope with climate change.
Thursday's meeting, to be followed by a May conference in Oslo, was focused on developing forest-preserving measures agreed on in principle at the last U.N. climate conference in December in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Specifically, nations need to work out how to disburse the $30 billion pledged by rich countries over the next three years. In total world leaders agreed to spend $100 billion by 2020 to help poor nations preserve forests, protect coasts, adjust drought-threatened crops, build water supplies and irrigation systems, and adopt low-carbon energy options such as solar and wind power.
Sarkozy said he hopes the Paris conference will bring more funding pledges for forests while working out how to organize the aid and include the private sector.
Deforestation — through the burning of woodlands or the rotting of felled trees — is thought to account for up to 20 percent of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere — as much as that emitted by all the world's cars, trucks, trains, planes and ships combined.
Thanks to deforestation for logging, crop-growing and cattle grazing, Indonesia and Brazil have become the world's third- and fourth-largest carbon emitters, after China and the United States.
Sarkozy said defending the world's forests demanded more aggressive funding to help developing and poor nations put change into effect.
"Those who don't want to do anything are those who don't want to pay," he said in an opening address, adding that those countries know who they are.
Several African ministers complained that not enough money has been committed to the enormous and long-term task of fighting deforestation, and they said funds already pledged should be quickly released.
Managing and protecting forests must involve the very people who live off them, namely indigenous populations, Gabon Environment Minister Martin Mabala said.
"Forests are a planetary asset and no longer the concern of individual countries," Mabala said. "This is the business of all humanity."
Delegates to the Copenhagen conference did agree on a forest program known as REDD, for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, but a parallel program to protect tropical forests by having rich countries pay other nations concerned fell apart.
Calling the Copenhagen conference "frustrating" in failing to reach a final deal, Sarkozy said the Paris delegates nevertheless needed to advance what was agreed there to "give the world confidence" and "open the way to progress on other points" at the next global U.N. climate summit scheduled for December in Cancun, Mexico.
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