Even though we live on the periphery of a rain forest, few Guyanese appreciate the economic potential of our hinterland. We tend to think of the interior as something that ought to be exploited – deforested, opened up with highways and developed into villages and towns – if it is to generate revenue. But as the international response to global climate change gathers force, that paradigm may soon become defunct. The consequences of environmental damage are now too obvious to ignore. In the next few years developed countries will have little alternative but to expand existing carbon offset arrangements, and to purchase pollution credits at competitive, market-driven prices, even though no mechanisms now exist to pay compensation for preservation of standing forests.
In the latest edition of the New Yorker magazine, Michael Specter observes that: “when forests disappear, the earth loses one of its two essential carbon sponges (the other is the ocean). The results are visible even from space
