French Leader Goes Green To Woo Pacific Islands

Varirata National Park, Papua New Guinea, July 28 (AFP/APP) :France's President Emmanuel Macron stripped off his suit jacket Friday to wander the wild forests of Papua New Guinea on a green-tinted charm offensive in the South Pacific.

Macron is telling Pacific leaders that France understands the threat they face from a warming Earth, from rising seas swamping low-lying islands to a loss of wildlife, wilder weather, and the financial costs they impose.

It is a message he has already pushed on his first two Pacific stops, on the eroded coastline of the French territory of New Caledonia and in the sea-threatened archipelago of Vanuatu where he joined a call for the phasing out of fossil fuels.

In Papua New Guinea, Macron wore no jacket, and at one point no tie, as he walked two kilometers (more than a mile) with Prime Minister James Marape through the lush Varirata National Park, touting a French initiative to remunerate countries that preserve their old-growth forests.

Natural forest covers 14 percent of the Earth's surface and is a huge reservoir of stored carbon, which is released when burned -- "so that in a way we go backward", Macron said.

The world already finances reforestation, he said, arguing that there is no economic model to preserve the woodlands that already exist.

To address this, the first so-called Forest, Climate, Biodiversity project was signed Friday with Papua New Guinea, to be managed by the French development agency with 60 million Euros ($66 million) in financing from the European Union.

Other non-governmental organizations are already aboard, French officials say, and they hope to get the private sector involved, too.