World must pay poorer nations to keep forests: Stern

By Ed Davies

JAKARTA (Reuters) - A major U.N. conference on global warming in December should target setting up a system to pay developing nations such as Indonesia and Brazil to keep their forests, an influential climate change expert said on Friday.

In the short term, up to $15 billion extra a year should be set aside by richer nations to preserve forests, which help soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, Nicholas Stern, author of an acclaimed report published last year, told a forum.

The resort island of Bali will host climate change talks in December likely to launch formal negotiations about extending the Kyoto Protocol after its first period ends in 2012.

The pact is the main U.N. plan for curbing global warming and the annual gathering will attract government officials and non-governmental organizations from around the globe.

"I believe that one of the goals for the Bali conference should be to design a supply side for emissions reduction from developing countries that can really work on a big scale," said Stern, whose report in October argued it would be much cheaper for the world to take action now on climate change than to delay.

His comments are likely to add to a push by an alliance of developing nations, including Papua New Guinea, which has called at past Kyoto gatherings for rich nations to pay to save rainforests.

The former World Bank chief economist said such a mechanism was "so that a country like Indonesia or a country like Brazil can contract as a country to reduce emissions from deforestation and be paid as a country for that work."

"We all benefit from reductions in emissions and we should all contribute to the cost of doing that," Stern told the forum on global climate change and Indonesia. He is now an adviser to the British government on global warming.