Every year an area half the size of the UK is cleared of natural forests: from temperate and tropical, North and South and on every continent. These forests, which once covered half the planet, are irreplaceable and their loss has a huge economic, social and environmental impact. Unknown numbers of people and countless species of plants and animals are wholly dependent on forests to live; forests support up to 1.6 billion of the world’s poorest people.

Last Year’s UN environment programme report, “The Last Stand of the Orang-utan” says that the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra are being cleared so rapidly that by the early 2020s the apes may well be extinct.

A wider problem is deforestation: as a result of the destruction and burning of Indonesia’s forest and peat lands for Palm Oil plantations, 1.8 billion tonnes of green house gas emissions are released according to Greenpeace. This means that 4% of global emissions are coming from 0.1% of the land on Earth.