One of the major problems we have is that this amazing carbon sink is being destroyed, there have been quite a few years where slash and burn in rainforests has competed with the burning of fuels as the major source of carbon emissions. We face a major challenge to halt that, but to actually reverse it entirely and aim for a radical recreation and expansion seems ambitious. My understanding was that rainforests take hundreds, perhaps thousands of years to develop.
The problem is that by focusing on rainforests, we also unfairly target some of the poorest countries on earth. Coming from westerners, who essentially deforested an entire continent (Europe) and chopped down and replanted another one (US/Canada), this message is highly hypocritical. If you're a poor farmer making $3000/year in Brazil or Indonesia you don't give two shits about what some latte-sipping American thinks about the rainforest, you're worried about feeding your family and getting your kids a good education.
The solution is to actually subsidize these farms out of chopping down the rainforest. If you pay the farmer $5k to not slash and burn the rainforest so they can plant their crops there, they won't because that income is almost as much as they would make anyway. The problem is, this doesn't really work at scale. But that's economics; if we truly valued the rain forest as much as we said we did, we would be willing to pay to keep it around (like Norway actually does).
