The Prince of Wales's senior adviser on rainforests, Dr Andrew Mitchell, wants people to wake up to the reality of rainforest deforestation by going to Trafalgar Square to see the effect it has for themselves.

Next week (November 16-22), an installation by Angela Palmer, an Oxford-based artist, will fill the heart of the capital with a work called "Ghost Forest", a series of rainforest tree stumps transported from Ghana.

"It's not the sort of forest we want to see in future," said Mitchell in the keynote speech to mark the start of World Responsible Tourism Day at the World Travel Market, the premier global event for the travel industry, in London's ExCel exhibition centre. "When I go to places where the rainforest has been destroyed, it puts a lump in my throat. It's like going to a huge football match and everyone in the crowd is lying dead in their seat."

"Where climate change is concerned, we are all sort of holding our breath and hoping it might just go away.

"Thirteen million hectares of rainforest - an area the size of England - are going up in smoke each year," said Mitchell, who besides advising the Prince of Wales is also director of the Global Canopy Programme. Around 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions come from this source. That's more than all the planes, ships and cars transporting people around the world. It's equivalent to flying 12.5m people from London the New York every day.

"The forest canopy is rather like the lining of our lungs, a delicate interface between life and the atmosphere, that is hard to reach yet vital to our survival, that we can easily stuff up by in effect smoking too much."

Business interests, Mitchell said, were driving the destruction and the reason for that was simple: rainforests are worth more dead than alive. He called on governments and individual people to turn that equation on its head.

In June, while the G20 summit was taking place in London, Prince Charles presented his Emergency Package for Tropical Forests. It called for immediate funding to help build capacity in rainforest nations to halt deforestation and to help them move to a low carbon development path where prosperity does not depend on converting forests.

"This was broadly supported by the 20 or so world leaders present," said Mitchell, "and now the informal working group that was set up is seeking ways to implement a package of measures at the scale of some $US 20 billion. It has to be at that scale to start to turn things around."

Mitchell was optimistic that a framework agreement on REDD - Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation that would integrate the aim of emissions reductions from curbing deforestation into the successor to the Kyoto Protocol may be put into place at the UN Climate Change Conference in December. This could start to generate the billions of dollars needed to halt deforestation.

If delegates to the Copenhagen conference need any reminding of the impact of deforestation, they will find it at close hand. After its installation in Trafalgar Square, Palmer's "Ghost Forest" will be taken to the Danish capital and installed there for the duration of the meeting. - End - About World Travel Market World Travel Market, the premier global event for the travel industry, is the must-attend four-day business-to-business exhibition for the worldwide travel and tourism industry. Almost 50,000 senior travel industry professionals, government ministers and international press, embark on ExCeL - London every November to network, negotiate and discover the latest industry opinion and trends at WTM. WTM, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2009, is the event where the travel industry conducts and concludes its deals. WTM is owned by the world's leading events organiser Reed Exhibitions (RE), which organises a portfolio of other travel industry events including Arabian Travel Market and International Luxury Travel Market. RE holds more than 500 events in 38 countries throughout Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific covering 47 industry sectors including aerospace & aviation, healthcare, manufacturing and sport & recreation. In 2008 RE, part of the Reed Elsevier group, brought together more than six million industry professionals from around the world generating billions of dollars in business.

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