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BALI, Indonesia - For decades, a flood of aid and an army of conservationists couldn’t save Indonesia’s rain forests from illegal loggers, land-hungry peasants and the spread of giant plantations. Now the world is looking at a simpler approach: up-front cash.

Whether it was arming forest police or backing schemes to certify legal logs, no tactic could silence the chain saws or douse the intentional fires that each day destroy 20 more square miles of Indonesia’s rain forests, and an estimated 110 square miles elsewhere in the world’s tropics.

The problem was pure economics: Neither local authorities nor the rural poor, in Indonesia and elsewhere, have a material incentive to keep their forests intact.

That could now change because of a decision at December’s U.N. climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, to negotiate a deal, as part of the next international climate agreement, under which countries would be rewarded for reducing their galloping rates of deforestation, a big contributor to global warming.

The cash might come directly from a fund financed by richer northern nations, or through “carbon credits” granted per unit of forest saved. The credits could be traded on the world carbon market, where a northern industry can buy such allowances to help meet its own required reductions in emissions of global-warming gases.

Indonesia and other tropical countries backing the “avoided deforestation” concept hope this carbon price will outpace what landowners could get from logging the forests or clearing them for palm oil, rubber, soybean or other plantations.

“For the next decade, the international community and countries that negotiate this convention have tremendous potential, tremendous power in their hands,” said Benoit Bosquet, head of a World Bank project to prepare poorer countries to take part in the new initiative, known as REDD, for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation.

“There will be a lot of money going in there,” he said. “You will see actors currently converting forest to plantations and cattle ranches saying, ‘Wait a minute. If I get more money to preserve my forest than to produce beef, then of course I will keep my forest standing.”’

From REDD to reality not easy
But turning REDD into reality is far from guaranteed, given competing interests among tropical countries, the world’s growing demand for plantation products, and its poor track record in controlling deforestation.

The tangled question of forests has dogged climate negotiations for years.

Deforestation was left out of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol because of concerns that tradable credits for saving forests would take pressure off northern nations to reduce their own industries’ greenhouse-gas emissions as required under that accord. But scientific uncertainty also muddies the picture.

The carbon dioxide spewed into the atmosphere by the burning and rotting of deforestation is estimated to account for 20 percent of manmade greenhouse-gas emissions. But from Brazil’s mahogany trees to Papua New Guinea’s thick-trunked kauri, how much carbon is stored in which of the world’s forests? How much carbon dioxide is absorbed by which trees?

Dita Alangkara / AP Acacia logs wait to be transported at left while standing forest is at right on Indonesia's Sumatra Island in this Nov. 2 photo.

A technical body under the U.N. climate treaty is collecting proposals from governments on how to address such issues. It’s the first step toward negotiating a deal by 2009, as part of an overall agreement on deeper emissions cuts to succeed Kyoto when it expires in 2012.

Beyond the technical, however, political disputes will complicate the U.N. talks.

The focus may be on today’s deforestation, but India, Costa Rica and others believe they should get credit for having been “good” — protecting their forests over the years. Some rain-forest governments, meanwhile, want commercial tree plantations counted in the mix, a move environmentalists oppose.