Forest clearance for farming or urban development released large amounts of the greenhouses gases blamed for climate change, he told reporters at a meeting in Indonesia's capital, Jakarta.

"The world has to work together to provide a strong fund to cut deforestation in Indonesia, Brazil and other countries," he said.

In a landmark report commissioned by the British government, Stern warned last year that climate change could bring economic disaster on the scale of the world wars and the 1930s' Great Depression unless urgent action was taken.

"The cost of action, strong and urgent action, will be very much less than the cost of inaction," he said in Jakarta.

"If we do nothing, if we go on with business as usual, we will eventually derail growth and development."

Rich nations had a powerful interest in helping to preserve forest cover because they would also be affected by global warming, he said.

"The money is not charity -- it's investing in a future of which they will be the big beneficiaries," said Stern, who is due to visit Indonesia's Sumatra island to see the problem of deforestation close up.

Experts say Indonesia has about two percent of the world's forest area but is losing large amounts of it annually, which releases carbon dioxide and makes the country one of the world's largest greenhouse gases polluters.

The 10 billion dollar global fund could be used to provide compensation to discourage forest clearance, Mike Harrison, an expert from Britain's Department for International Development, told AFP.

The money could also be given to national parks to conserve forests and some could be used to fund forest concessions, he said.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation said this month that forests were expanding in several regions of the world, but that each day saw a net loss equivalent to an area twice the size of Paris.

Global forest covers about 30 percent of the world's land area. From 1990 to 2005, the world lost three percent of its total forest area, according to the organisation.

Ten countries account for 80 percent of the world's primary forests, of which Indonesia, Mexico, Papua New Guinea and Brazil saw the highest losses in the five years from 2000 to 2005, it said.

The IPCC, the United Nations' paramount scientific authority on global warming, has predicted the Earth's surface temperatures will rise between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius (3.2 and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100.

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