Leaders of the Group of 20 (G20) nations meeting this week in the United Kingdom G20 agreed to consider a multi-billion pound “emergency package” to save the rainforests following a meeting with the Prince Charles.

In a historic meeting at St. James’s Palace, the Prince told a number of heads of state that more must be done to protect the rainforests as a means of slowing the rate of climate change.

His charity, the Prince’s Rainforest Project, proposes paying poorer countries billions of pounds not to chop down trees through market mechanisms, however this could take years to put into action.

In the meantime, the Prince wants an “emergency package” to inject billions of pounds into saving the rainforest as soon as the beginning of next year.

The leaders in attendance included Japanese prime minister Taro Aso, European Commission president José Manuel Barroso, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, U.S. secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, German chancellor Angela Merkel, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, and World Bank president Robert Zoellick, among others.

The world leaders agreed to try and set up a means of raising the emergency funding. Financial mechanisms could include asking insurance and pension companies to invest in “rainforest bonds”.

In the long term, an international working group will look at the Prince’s other proposals as well as a ideas to save the rainforests from other charitable organizations and governments.

The Prince told the meeting that halting deforestation, which accounts for around a fifth of global carbon emissions, was key to tackling climate change.

“As important and concerning as the global financial crisis is, its challenges and consequences will pale into insignificance when compared with the scale and extent of human misery and suffering, social and economic if our actions to tackle climate change are too little or too late or both,” he said.

(Sources: London Telegraph / OC staff)