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The UN collaborative initiative on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (Redd) could also be used to fight unemployment, he said.

Redd, and its reforestation effort Redd-plus, launched in 2008 out of the Bali Action Plan agreed to in UN climate-change talks. Redd provides "payments for environmental services" to 13 developing nations who have agreed to protect and replant forests. Twenty more countries have signed on to the programme.

"Redd is moving faster than the negotiations right now. People get that there are jobs in forestry, in carbon storage," said Nick Nuttall, spokesman for the UN Environmental Programme. "The best tried-and-tested form of carbon capture has been going on for millions of years and is the ability of nature to naturally and efficiently capture carbon out of atmosphere and lock it away."

Programmes in Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia have been particularly successful.

While Redd has focused on rainforests thus far, Nuttall said he would like to see the scope broadened to dry lands like those in SA.

"One-third of carbon-storage potential in world is in dry lands," he said. "And there are a lot of degraded forests in KwaZulu-Natal and thickets in the Eastern Cape that have huge potential for reforestation."

The programme has the potential to improve employment rates in impoverished areas better than natural-resource extraction and manufacturing, he said. Preserving a forest is more complicated than "just put[ting] up a fence."

"Are [the unemployed] all going to make iPods and iPhones? And are we, in the developed world, going to buy 15 iPods and 15 iPhones?" he said. "Ensuring the safety of the forest from fires and pests is employment."

Critics of the programme said there were not enough safeguards to protect the rights of indigenous peoples, not enough funding, and that developed nations were using the programme to offset their own poor carbon-emissions records, rather than change their behaviour.

Nuttall implored supporters to use the upcoming climate-change talks (COP17) in Durban to work out these issues and further accelerate expansion of Redd.