I long ago swore that I would avoid all big UN Conferences on environment or climate change issues, and have pretty much stuck to that sanity-protecting rule. Indeed, John Prescott got very grumpy with me when I declined the opportunity to be part of the UK delegation at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. But he was almost always grumpy with me, so it didn’t matter too much.

The only downside to this self-imposed embargo on all such jamborees is that one undoubtedly misses out on those rare moments of drama that almost (but not quite!) compensate for the hours spent in such soul-crushing misery.

One such moment occurred right at the end of the Bali Conference on Climate Change last year. By general agreement, Bali was even more of a soul-crusher than most of these Conferences, in part because of the deplorable behaviour of the US delegation that played an out-and-out spoiler from Day One right through into extra time.

With delegates in despair, and some in tears, the country representative from Papua New Guinea (a guy called Kevin Conrad) stood up and told the US delegation either to recognise the overwhelming will of the Conference (and agree to the Bali Declaration) or get out of the Conference Chamber and scuttle back to Washington cloaked in contempt and ignominy. Very high drama! And fortunately, the US did sign up.

So it was quite a treat to meet up with Kevin Conrad at the Cheltenham Science Festival last week. He was talking about some of the really exciting new ideas around the incentivisation for rainforest countries to keep their rainforests intact rather than cutting them down. A simple but powerful idea: the world needs to protect its remaining rainforests (deforestation contributes up to 20% of total CO2 emissions every year), but they are not “our” rainforests – they are part of the resource base of a number of countries that desperately need the income from their forest to help them develop. So we need them in place; they need them logged and sold on.

One solution is therefore to compensate them financially for not cutting the forests down, and there is now a huge amount of effort going in to developing financial instruments to help “reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation” – or REDD, as it’s called. A new report published in the Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society shows just how much could be achieved here for just a few billion dollars every year. Very challenging stuff.

And that is what Kevin Conrad is now out there doing – building up a growing head of steam around REDD financing.

Unfortunately, there was one big black cloud hanging over Kevin’s presentation – namely, the ongoing destruction of Papua New Guinea’s own forest. Using the latest remote sensing techniques, a team of scientists based at Port Moresby University, has calculated that PNG is logging its forests even faster than Brazil is cutting down the Amazon rainforests. In 2007, an astonishing 1.7% of the entire forest base was cut down – if it continues at that rate, a full 50% will have disappeared by 2021.

To which there was only one response from his audience. Let’s get this REDD stuff up and running before it’s too late.