in Pasadena and investment banks before taking a job with Angco, Papua New Guinea’s largest coffee exporter. Now he was studying for an MBA in London and New York, and working informally as an adviser to Somare.

That day, the grand chief had forests on his mind. The country has the world’s third-largest rainforest, after the Congo and the Amazon. It is a kind of pleasure-dome of biological diversity: the haunt of 19,000 known plant species, tree kangaroos and the cassowary, a 6ft-tall flightless bird. But its trees are commercially valuable too, and for decades the country has been home to a notoriously corrupt logging industry. In 1987, a national commission described timber companies “roaming the countryside with the self-assurance of robber barons; bribing politicians and leaders, creating socialand began to gain traction in the UNFCCC. The World Bank got involved. In 2008, a British government review into the future of the world’s forests, conducted by Johan Eliasch, a Swedish businessman and environmentalist, predicted that a well-designed REDD system could cut global deforestation by up to 75% by 2030.

There was a political edge to REDD, as well, that made it stand out in the schismed world of the climate change talks. The main reason why the UNFCCC has been stuck all these years is because the world’s developing countries accuse industrialised nations of wrecking the planet, and they want hundreds of billions of dollars in compensation. The rich countries, for their part, observe that almost two-thirds of greenhouse gasses now come from the developing world, and