site, we entered an active logging concession and saw stacks of trunks of dull red kwila – Papua New Guinea’s most valuable tropical hardwood – lined up by the side of the road. “That’s the good stuff,” said Weiblen. The timber in a single mature kwila tree is worth around $10,000.

We spent the night in Wanang, the nearest village to the research plot, and continued the journey on foot the following day. Dressed in shorts and the green singlet of one of Papua New Guinea’s rugby league teams, Weiblen walked fast among the roots and draped vines that hung down from the trees above. Since the summer, Papua New Guinea has been experiencing its worst El Niño drought since 1997, and Weiblen was taken aback by the lackIn the long run, the vision is that countries will achieve large, official nationwide emissions savings, and they will trade these, most likely on a massive government-to-government basis. In the meantime, however, entrepreneurs and communities who have set up REDD+ pilot projects in the last few years want to sell carbon credits now, on voluntary markets, and to wait for a global architecture to emerge.

In Papua New Guinea any talk of individual schemes raises uneasy memories of the carbon craze. But that has not stopped one man, and one project from going ahead anyway. Stephen Hooper, the Australian carbon developer who established the Sepik river REDD+ project, which Frank Nolwo joined, sold his first carbon credits in 2013. The project, known as April Salumei, has been certified to