The lesson for India after Durban is that it needs to formulate an approach that combines attention to industrialised countries’ historical responsibility for the problem with an embrace of its own responsibility to explore low carbon development trajectories. This is both ethically defensible and strategically wise. Ironically, India’s own domestic national approach of actively exploring “co-benefits” – policies that promote development while also yielding climate gains – suggests that it does take climate science seriously and has embraced responsibility as duty.

Deforestation in the tropics is an important source of carbon C release to the atmosphere. To provide a sound scientific base for efforts taken to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD+) good estimates of C stocks and fluxes are important. We present components of the C balance for selectively logged lowland tropical dipterocarp rainforest in the Malua Forest Reserve of Sabah, Malaysian Borneo.

Programmes to address global warming and promote green development, such as Payments for Ecosystem Services and Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and [forest] Degradation financed by carbon-offset trading, are framed by a world-as-market paradigm that subsumes social goals within a project of globalized eco-economic management. Because market-based strategies reinforce existing property claims and power relations, Kathleen McAfee argues that they are likely to worsen inequality without yielding net, global environmental benefits.

In the absence of historical field data, developing countries can rely on consistent current ground data and remote sensing assessments.

Ecuador's Yasuni-ITT initiative, a pilot project to protect the climate and the rainforest has failed miserably. How might international agreements on environmental protection be achieved in the future?