Brazil: Pay us to keep our trees up to sustain the world's lungs?

MANAUS, BRAZIL – I’m writing this in darkness on the roof of the Palace Hotel (a misnomer!) where we are staying here in Manaus.

We are a world away from Sao Paolo – or should I say a four hour flight – yet still well inside Brazil. That gives you a sense of the size of the place.

This is the heart of the Amazon region, itself at the very heart of the Copenhagen climate change talks. They are relieved here to learn that Obama is finally going to be there if, rather curiously, in the middle of the thing rather than at what many hope will be a climactic ending.

The battered white Amazon steamers and ferries are drawn up against the promenade below me the twinkling street lights dance on the water – a breadth of water so wide it’s almost an unending fast moving muddy lake.

And what is man up to here? For a start he and she are here in vast profusion, a million and a half of them. And yet here it has the feel of a developing country. The multi-ethnic Brazil of Sao Paolo has given way to a more homogenous Amazon Indian ethnicity.

Many have the appearance of having come from the rural poor, drawn here by industry – rubber – and on the run from those who have stolen their lands and felled the trees.

Here there are few tower blocks. What man is doing, heaven help us, is constructing a gigantic bridge to span these waters and carry the dreaded car across to the virgin forest wastes on the other side. The pylons stand like match sticks in the water a mile down river from here. It will be a graceful structure, one must hope it serves no disgraceful future.

The shops are poor, the market extensive, rambling and packed. Each shop and stall seems to sell much the same as the last – Christmas decorations, cooking pots, towels and cheap nylon garments. In this heat! In this humidity!

We are on the equator and you drip from every pore, your hair is soaked. We could be in Nigeria, in Calcutta, in Burma, but we are in thrusting cutting-edge Brazil. Brazil with its space programme, its helicopter commuters, its Samba dancers and its bankers.

Yes, rich Brazil and its rain forests (a stretch of trees nearly the size of Wales is felled every years to make way for cattle farming).

Suddenly we are at the very epicentre of what Copenhagen is all about. It is about this vast CO2-sapping country with its ethanol and its dams and its surging carbon-emitting development. What combustion.

So what answer can we give Brazil? Cut your emission, we can’t but you could? No, they will have to do better than that and much better than Obama’s paltry offer of, in effect, a six per cent reduction of emissions on 1990 levels. By 2020.

It’s all to play for and this country is in the thick of it. Pay us to keep our trees up to sustain the world’s lungs, goes the cry. And why not? Take a look at the matter of REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) – it’s one bit of Copenhagen that may get through.