Things just seem to be getting more and more gloomy in the run-up to the Copenhagen Conference. On Tuesday, the Independent front page, shouted out the following dire prediction: “World on course for catastrophic six degree centigrade rise”. Six degrees centigrade isn’t just a lot worse than 4 degrees, let alone infinitely worse than 2 degrees centigrade (which scientists believe to be the threshold above which average temperatures must not be allowed to rise). It represents game-over for human civilization.

So it was a welcome relief to be present yesterday at a seminar organised by the Prince of Wales’s Rainforest Project. Plenty of grim reminders of worsening trends all around the world, but balancing that out with some truly inspirational stuff – from the President of Guyana (which, together with Costa Rica, has done more than any other country to pioneer the idea of development for its people by keeping its rainforest intact), the President of Gabon and senior politicians from Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The simple reality is this: an interim financing mechanism of around 20 billion euros would reduce levels of deforestation by 25% by 2015. And that would mean a net saving of 23 billion tonnes of CO2 through to 2020.

It’s still just possible that Copenhagen will do a deal on that (as part of the REDD discussions – Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation), even if it doesn’t do the whole deal in terms of a new legally binding agreement as a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

If the REDD deal is done, the role of the Prince of Wales in setting up his Rainforest Project, in persuading an incredible bunch of corporate sponsors and celebrities to get behind the campaign, in convening world leaders during the G20 meeting earlier this year, in twisting arms in the World Bank and in the UK Government itself, will, I hope, be properly recognised. This is a notoriously difficult area in which to make much progress, but the establishment of the Informal Working Group for Interim Funding really has moved things forward, with the United States pledging $275 million yesterday to an emergency scheme.

As with every other aspect of the Copenhagen Conference, there’s still so much to be done between now and the middle of December. The urgency couldn’t be greater. As speakers confirmed so eloquently yesterday, if we make a start on the REDD agenda next year, more than three times as much CO2 would be abated by 2020 if we delay any start by 2015.

This could therefore be the defining decision. As the Prince of Wales keeps pointing out to people, “if we lose the battle against tropical deforestation, we lose the battle against climate change”.  Exactly.

Today Forum for the Future is publishing a report which we hope will help governments and business to take urgent action to save the rainforests.

The Forest Investment Review was commissioned by the UK government, and sets out to shape thinking in the run-up to the UN’s conference on climate change in Copenhagen and beyond.

Protecting the world’s forests is a crucial part of the fight against global warming - deforestation and forest degradation account for around 18% of all global greenhouse gas emissions.

But the fact is that all over the world deforestation is driven by people’s need to make a living, whether it’s clearing land for subsistence farming or for intensive agriculture. So we have to find ways to reward people for looking after what is a vital global resource.

We’ve looked at how to finance the conservation of forests and generate sustainable economic development for the communities which depend on them. And we’ve looked at how government spending can unlock private investment to achieve funding on the scale we need.

The Forest Investment Review was commissioned by the UK's Department of International Development (DFID) and Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), which are heavily engaged in climate change discussions with other governments ahead of Copenhagen. The report will help inform government policy-makers, in both developed countries and in the developing forest nations.

It’s the work of a team of experts in finance and forests, brought together by the Forum to assess the different areas in which private sector finance can be mobilised. They’ve each contributed a chapter focussing on a different aspect of the issue, for example what might encourage big institutional investors like pension funds to invest in forests.

We’re publishing each chapter as a separate paper on our website and we plan to make them available as a full report in a few weeks' time.

Image: STILLFX

If someone asks you to think about technology’s contribution to sustainability, most people latch on to the ‘flashy’ solutions – those that replace physical travel; seamlessly integrate public transport to make it usable and attractive; and other such things.

But what is often overlooked is the already well-established, but arguably duller, role of ICT in Environmental Information Processing – the data collation, analysis and management systems that we use to drive sustainability progress in our organisations, or which were needed to ‘find’ global warming by amalgamating complex data from thousands of dispersed weather stations.

I was fortunate enough to spend a number of years stomping about in Tanzanian rainforests hugging trees to measure their size and growth rates. At the time, I was assessing the environmental impact of diverting a river through the turbines of a major hydropower project, and had no thought for how the data I was collecting could be used elsewhere.

However, a paper published today in Nature (Increasing carbon storage in intact African tropical forests) has used the power of ICT to analyse my data, alongside that of 32 other scientists, to partially clear up the problem of the missing carbon sink.

We know that not all of the carbon dioxide emitted into the Earth’s atmosphere remains there, but what we were less clear on, is where the missing 17 billion tonnes actually goes. We knew that about half is taken up by the oceans, but that still left about eight billion mislaid tonnes...until now.

Now, it may seem a little obvious to say that we’ve found that rainforest trees have been getting bigger – a bit like announcing the discovery that alcohol gets you drunk – but this is, in fact, a big deal.

Previously, it was assumed that rainforest was essentially in a stable equilibrium – that the type and amount of biomass in an area of forest remained roughly constant over time, with new stem growth replacing tree death. What our combined data shows instead is that over the last few decades rainforest trees have been storing more carbon in their trunks than expected, and that each hectare of undisturbed African rainforest has been storing an additional 0.6 tonnes of carbon per year (equivalent to about two tonnes of atmospheric CO2).

In total, we estimate that tropical forests remove a massive 4.8 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions from the atmosphere each year of which 1.2 billion tonnes are mopped-up in this previously unknown African carbon sink.

These trees are giving us a free subsidy – absorbing 18% of the CO2 we add to the atmosphere and buffering us a little against the onslaught of climate change, but it is clearly not going to last forever.

Trees will not continue to get bigger in perpetuity, and indeed their very existence is continually threatened by ‘development’ and the inability (to date) of the global community to be able to assign a greater financial value to them standing rather than clear cut.

That may be about to change with the REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) negotiations at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen at the end of this year. The hope is that, finally, the global carbon community will recognise that haggling over the precise volume of carbon sequestered by trees over their lifetime, or nitpicking about the qualifying criteria for a forest-protection scheme is doing nothing but hastening the time at which such considerations become immaterial.

It is an unequivocal fact that living trees absorb carbon, and dead trees don’t. It is also, therefore, undisputed that there is no way we’ll be able to achieve our 2050 CO2 stabilisation targets without the sequestration help of our remaining forests. This latest work adds yet more weight to the argument of forest protection and investment, by proving that their importance as a carbon sink is greater than we realised. We hope that the REDD deliberations will listen to us.

And so back to the original question – if you were to be asked about technology’s contribution to sustainability, what would your answer be now?

Image: Eky Chan