Deforestation accounts for about 20 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human activities, UN data shows.
The environmental charity, Earthwatch, will outline its concerns during a public lecture.

“This year is the crunch time for forests and climate change,” Earthwatch’s head of climate change research Dan Bebber told BBC News. “We are hoping for big things from the Copenhagen climate summit at the end of 2009,” he added, referring to a much anticipated UN gathering. Unless we tackle the question of forests as a mitigation method for climate change, then we will really have lost the battle to keep greenhouse gas concentrations below levels that many people would consider to be dangerous.”

Despite the measures introduced by the UN’s Kyoto Protocol on climate change, global emissions of CO2 have continued to rise as a result of increasing energy consumption and the loss of forest cover.