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POZNAN, POLAND: "This is the best selling book of the conference," said Andrew Mitchell, brandishing a small red volume, when I bumped in to him on the fringes of a fairly loud demonstration.

Andrew is director of the - that's "canopy" as in forests, not as in tents - and a leading light in the movement to reward people in developing countries for looking after the tracts of forest that ameliorate atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide by processing it into oxygen.

The book is the Little Redd Book. It's not to be confused with the Little Red Book that Mao Zedong was reputed to carry almost everywhere, although as both purport to be distillations of wisdom on their chosen topic, you could perhaps see a parallel.

Redd with two Ds - or - is the hot property in climate change this year.

The problem with being a hot property, as Lewis Hamilton or Britney Spears might testify, is that everyone wants a piece of you.

Governments that stand to gain financially certainly want a piece of it - notwithstanding any genuine desire they might have to do something about the atmosphere's carbon dioxide levels. So do the companies that can see profits in the trading and consulting and monitoring that will go into a final package; and so do the indigenous peoples who were protesting as I chatted to Andrew.

The book is a compendium of the various proposals on Redd which have been submitted to the , the body that will eventually work out a set of rules on the issue.

Sixteen governments, three regional blocs and 13 non-governmental organisations have sent in proposals; and now, one of the UNFCCC's subsidiary bodies is thrashing through the various notions and trying to come up with a text that everyone can live with.

The proposals differ in several ways. How should finance be raised - through the buying and selling of credits, through mechanisms linked with but not part of the carbon market, or through voluntary funds? Should money be awarded nationally or locally?

Should the baseline for measuring deforestation be a historical one; and if so, what should be the date? If avoiding degradation is to be included, how should it be defined and measured?

And what, precisely, should be rewarded - the preservation of forests or the storage of carbon, which are not precisely the same thing?

Any combination of these parameters will provide bigger or smaller wins for the countries saving their trees. So politics enters the fray, just as it did during the long years after 1997 that negotiators spent trying to establish a rulebook for the Kyoto Protocol, when nations haggled long and hard over the precise definition of a tree.

So Costa Rica wants deforestation to be measured against a 1990 baseline - the same year against which greenhouse gas emissions are measured in the UN system. But Costa Rica has already done very well in protecting its forest, and therefore stands to gain from those years of protection.

Brazil wants rewards for slowing deforestation, as measure against a historical rate. But India argues this unfairly rewards "countries with historically high deforestation rates" - subtext, "unfairly rewards Brazil" - because all it has to do is make a bad thing a bit less bad.

And so on, and so on. Andrew has put the [pdf link] on the web, so you can peruse it at your leisure.

And the indigenous groups? Well, they were protesting against the removal of language from the working text that recognised the rights of indigenous forest dwellers.

"We are only asking for that the Redd text recognises the ," declaimed Tom Goldtooth, a US activist of Navajo and Lakota descent.

"We stand with our brothers and sisters in the forested regions in asking for a suspension of the Redd process."

They accused in particular Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US of scratching out the key words.

Andrew Mitchell was sympathetic. "Redd is one of the greatest opportunities to save the world's tropical forests, and to exclude people who spend their lives living in the forest and protecting the forest just seems perverse."

Maybe the text will go back in - maybe not. But the issue does illustrate how complex and politicised an apparently simple idea can become - sorry, scratch that, how complex it does become - once 190-odd countries start using it as a football.

Forests are not just carbon stores. They are home to people, and to animals and ecosystems. They provide and regulate fresh water, create local climates, protect huge tracts of land.

Ideally, I suppose, the Redd discussions should take all of these factors into account. If you're rewarding a country's forest protection because it stores carbon, why not also reward it for protecting monkey habitat, or safeguarding the watershed of a river that will irrigate fields downstream, or keeping indigenous cultures alive - always provided that you think those are good things, of course?

But that would make things even more complex, and more politicised. Then the wood really would start to obscure the trees.

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