Let the people look after their forests

摘要

Give tropical forests back to the people who live in them - and the trees will soak up your carbon for you. Above all, keep the forests out of the hands of government. So concludes a study that has tracked the fate of 80 forests worldwide over 15 years.rnMost tropical forests - from Himalayan hill forests to the Madagascan jungle - are controlled by local and national governments. Forest communities own and manage little more than a tenth. They have a reputation for trashing their trees - cutting them for timber or burning them to clear land for farming. In reality the opposite is true, according to Ashwini Chhatre of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.