Soon after, a nation-wide consultation enabled us to develop a strategy that aimed even higher: we would seek not just to protect our forests, but to shift our entire economy onto a low-carbon trajectory with economic growth coming from new sectors, and with our country’s economy powered almost entirely by renewable energy. This plan had a simple proposition at its core: those who benefit from our standing forests must contribute to their maintenance. We realised that most efforts to maintain our forests would continue to come from the people of Guyana, including our Amerindian (indigenous) communities. Yet we felt that international citizens must also pay their share, given the immense benefits our forests contribute to stabilising the global climate, securing carbon sequestration, and maintaining water and other ecosystem services. In 2008, however - even before the REDD+ mechanism had been agreed - we wanted to show that progress was possible. Norway was one of the first developed countries to recognise that protecting tropical forests was both an essential and highly cost-effective way to combat climate change.