News
HRH calls for a global partnership to tackle climate change in an interview on the Today programme
14th May 2008
The Prince of Wales has said that the halting of logging in the world's rainforests is the single greatest solution to climate change in an interview with BBC Radio Four's Today programme.
The Prince said that saving the rainforests would be "the easiest and cheapest way of helping in the battle against climate change" and called for a "gigantic partnership" including governments, businesses and consumers to protect them.
In October 2007, His Royal Highness established The Prince’s Rainforests Project to find practical solutions to slow tropical deforestation and combat climate change.
In the interview, The Prince put the probable cost of halting deforestation in countries like Brazil, Congo and Indonesia at about £15billion ($30billion US dollars) a year, but said that this should be viewed as an insurance policy for the whole world.
The Prince said: "We would be crazy to ignore all the scientific advice that is coming at us left, right and centre.
"I don't want to be got at by your children and grandchildren – let alone mine - saying 'Why didn't you do something about it?'. It is our responsibility."
The Prince said that the rainforests were effectively "the air conditioning system for the entire planet".
He told Today: "When you think that they release 20 billion tonnes of water vapour into the air every day and also absorb carbon on a gigantic scale, they are incredibly valuable, and they provide the rainfall we all depend on."
About 1.4 billion of the world's poorest people live in rainforest areas, and the current economic system gives them incentives to clear trees for timber and to create farmland, said The Prince.
The international community needed to devise a system which would make the forests more valuable to their inhabitants alive than dead.
"It is a huge effort of trying to see if there is a way of developing a better integrated rural development programme in order to ensure that those people living in the rainforest areas, particularly Brazil, Indonesia and the Congo, can be adequately rewarded for the eco-system services that their forests provide the rest of the world," he said.
"What we have got to do is try to ensure that these forests are more valuable alive than dead. At the moment, there is more value in them being dead. This is the crazy thing."
The Prince said that the Stern Report put a price of $15-20billion US dollars a year to halve the destruction of the rainforests and estimated that stopping it altogether would cost about $30billion dollars annually.
"When you think that that is roughly just under one per cent of all the insurance premiums paid around the world in one year, if you look at it as an insurance premium we are paying to ensure that the world has some kind of rainfall and reasonable weather patterns, it is actually quite a good deal," he said.
"What I would like to try to achieve is a gigantic partnership trying to achieve a slightly different way of looking at this. In other words, business also needs to pay attention to some of the social dimension."
The Prince said that tackling deforestation should be a more urgent priority than developing new technologies to combat climate change, which could take a long while to come on-stream.
"If we can halt deforestation, what these rainforests do in absorbing carbon is infinitely more effective and cheaper to achieve than trying to indulge in all these very expensive technologies," he said.
His Royal Highness said he was not proposing any particular plan for saving the rainforests, but was trying to raise awareness of the problem and encourage governments and businesses to work together to solve it.
The Prince said he had already spoken to the White House and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, as well as the Presidents of Indonesia, Congo and France, and businesses including Barclays, Shell, Goldman Sachs and McDonalds.
An important part of the effort was to raise the awareness of consumers, so that they demand that products they buy are environmentally sustainable.
"Unless we do tackle it, then many people's lives are going to be even worse," said The Prince.
"I think we will end up seeing far more drought and starvation on a grand scale. I think weather patterns will become even more terrifying with even less rainfall.
"I think we are asking for something pretty dreadful unless we really understand the issues now and the urgency of these issues.
"If we can get enough people singing from the same hymn sheet and if we can raise awareness levels among the public and consumers around the world, maybe there is a chance to create enough momentum for governments to understand the urgency of this."
Click here to visit the BBC website and hear His Royal Highness's interview on the Today programme.
Click here to visit The Prince's Rainforests Project.