Offsets, however, are notoriously complex and expensive to develop, and fail to recognise the intrinsic worth of the standing forest.
Attaching rights to carbon in standing forest, while easier to define, will run into similar problems in places where ownership of forestland and forest services are weak and ill-defined.
At the moment, standing forest is of little commercial value, and much of it continues to exist only because of laws intended to prevent total clearance of the land.
"As long as dead forest is worth more in the market than living, standing forest, it's going to be a very tough, uphill fight to preserve very much, " says Stephan Schwartzman, director of tropical forest policy for the EDF.
And so there I was, standing in the forest among the women's gardens, remembering my grandmothers.
"Reversing this pattern will hinge on capturing the values of intact forests... so that local people's livelihoods are better when the forest is left standing than when it is cleared, " said the Cambridge professor of conservation science.
The 69-year-old Christenberry still makes the annual pilgrimage to Alabama each year, returning to the same locations: a strange red-brick building standing alone in Talladega National Forest, a juke joint that has since been torn down, churches and warehouses.
Moganshan was popular with expats with leisure time before the Communist revolution, and many older structures in the area are still standing in an area with a striking bamboo forest.
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They concentrated on Yunnan Province where Sino Forest claims to have purchased 200, 000 heactares of standing timber from one specific company.
The main international effort to speed it up is an idea known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), which pays people in developing countries to leave trees standing.
Standing 2, 430 m above sea level, in the midst of a tropical mountain forest in an extraordinarily beautiful setting, Machu Picchu was probably the most amazing urban creation of the Inca Empire at its height.
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