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COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Saving tropical forests is crucial to fighting climate change but efforts to halt deforestation could go awry without safeguards to protect and compensate local communities, officials and academics said on Sunday.

Forests act like "lungs" of the atmosphere, soaking up large amounts of mankind's greenhouse gas emissions. Billions of people also rely on them for food and livelihoods.

Paying developing nations to preserve forests is a central issue at U.N. climate talks in the Danish capital aimed at securing the outlines of tougher global deal to curb greenhouse gas emissions from 2013.

"Forests and climate issues have never been higher on the political agenda," Gro Harlem Brundtland, U.N. Special Envoy for Climate Change, told a meeting on the sidelines of the talks.

Yet forests were still being destroyed at an alarming rate, with no observable decrease in the pace of destruction since 1987, she said.

"We are still on our way to destroy an area the size of India by 2017," she said.

Tropical forests from equatorial Africa to Brazil and Indonesia contain some of the world's richest reserves of carbon and species but are under increasing threat for their timber and for the land to grow food for an ever-expanding human population.

Indigenous groups in the vast Amazon basin and deep in the jungles of Borneo island fear losing more of their lands to cattle ranchers or to palm and soy oil plantations.