Brazil : Zero Deforestation in Seven Years

Brazil, whose Amazon rain forest makes up 40 percent of its territory, aims to end net deforestation in seven years to help fight global warming, the environment ministry said.

The plan, which will be published in full on Sept. 29 and put to public debate, calls on Brazil to plant more trees than it loses through logging and slash-and-burn agriculture by 2015, the ministry said in a statement on its Web site.

``It's a bold plan, with voluntary and sectoral targets that together represent the reduction by hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide a year, be it through reducing waste, improving energy efficiency or the progressive reduction of deforestation and planting of native and commercial forests,'' Environment Minister Carlos Minc said in the statement.

As a developing country, Brazil isn't subject to targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. The burning of forests in Brazil, southeast Asia and elsewhere worldwide to clear land for crops releases carbon locked in trees into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, the main gas blamed for global warming.

Deforestation in Brazil in 2007, Latin America's most populous nation, declined 18 percent from a year earlier, the country's National Institute for Space Investigations said last month  A total of 11,532 square kilometers (4,454 square miles) of forest was cut down after a third year of declines, the agency said.