Pretend, for a moment, that you’re a farmer in Brazil who has been given a license by the government to raze rain forest lands in order to plant soy beans. On one hand, you’re not particularly thrilled about the idea of destroying thousands of acres of the rain forest. On the other hand…there is a lot of money to be made with these soy beans. If only there were some way to get money to not chop down the forests.

That’s exactly what some environmental groups are doing. Well aware that deforestation is leading factor in increased global warming, groups are now offering farmers money for every acre of rain forest they don’t cut down. At the moment, the New York Times reports that the money offered by these groups may not be enough to convince profit-minded farmers to leave trees standing. One farmer noted that he was being offered $12 an acre by an environmental group, but cleared land can fetch up to $1,300 an acre.

As noted above, deforestation is a leading factor in global warming–the pollution from clear-cutting combined with the decreased amount of trees taking in carbon and releasing oxygen means that deforestation accounts for twenty percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. The problem is, though, there’s no financial incentive to stop cutting down trees. Some nations have taken it upon themselves to try to enact change in this arena, most notably Norway, which has pledged $1 billion to help save Brazilian rain forests. And both the House and Senate’s climate change bills “include plans for rich countries and companies to pay the poor to preserve their forests.” But some people think that doesn’t go far enough.

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, said that deforestation “absolutely” needed to be addressed by a new international climate agreement being negotiated this year. “But people cut down trees because there is an economic rationale for doing it, and you need to provide them with a financial alternative,” he said.

I guess we’ll see in Copenhagen if that statement comes to anything, but you might like to read the whole article to see some of the barriers to that. Because if it were simple, we would have probably figured it out already.