After the failure of last year’s climate change negotiations in Copenhagen, the rhetoric about climate change threats was scaled right back at the meetings last week in Cancun, Mexico. This produced two important developments on forestry, a key issue for Indonesia.First, independent research now shows that deforestation is not a major generator of greenhouse gas emissions. Second, industrialized countries and WWF and Greenpeace failed to win agreement for their proposals that cessation of conversion of forest land should be a precondition for climate change aid to developing countries. Exaggeration of the impact of forest industries and understatement of the cost of halting forest conversion has been a standard feature of the climate change debate for over a decade. This has been fostered by Greenpeace and WWF.  For example, when the 2006 report by the British Government econ...