me recently. “It was something I hadn’t ever heard before. Like, I can catch fish and sell them for money. But this one was totally different.” He was intrigued. Four other local chairmen had already signed up with their communities. Nolwo decided to think about it. He bought what he needed for his house and started the long journey back to Kagiru.

Back on the water, Nolwo looked at the skinny, grey-barked trees set back from the muddy banks, thickening into forests on the hills behind. They framed the powerful and unforgiving landscape that he had known all his life: sources of food and fuel and spiritual energy, where men and women would spend a few days on their own from time to time, to prepare for rituals, andthings about REDD+ has always been that it was dreamed up in Papua New Guinea. In Wewak, in fact. Not on the day that Frank Nolwo came to town, but years earlier, in the spring of 2003. One afternoon, the former prime minister, and father of the country’s independence, Grand Chief Sir Michael Somare, was walking along the town’s beach with a charismatic business student called Kevin Conrad.

Conrad was in his mid-30s. The son of American missionaries, he had grown up near the village of Hayfield in the Sepik – he was born under a tree, he liked to say – and had known Somare since he was a boy. After graduating from high school, Conrad had gone to study in California, working at Nasa’s jet propulsion laboratory