20091218

MANGA, Democratic Republic of Congo (Reuters) - As world leaders haggle over a plan to fight global warming, tribes in Congo's rainforest have armed themselves with satellite GPS devices in the hope of coming out winners from any deal.

Their goal is simple: by creating an ecological inventory of their ancestral home, the tribes hope the world's second largest rainforest will be ringfenced as a weapon to combat climate change and so be spared from commercial loggers.

"If the forest is poorly managed, we won't get anything," said local green activist Dieudonne Nzabi.

"But if it is well managed, we will get more money than from commercial logging," he said, explaining the painstaking efforts of eight villagers this month to log exact coordinates of forest resources from cassava fields to freshwater springs.

While an overall deal from the climate summit in Copenhagen looked elusive on Thursday, a U.N.-backed deal to reward local communities for protecting their forests could yet emerge.

The official chairing negotiations on the so-called REDD (Reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation) scheme said on Wednesday a draft deal was "more or less agreed".

Second in size only to the Amazon rainforest, the 2.2 million square kilometre Congo forest stretches over five Central African nations. Under the REDD scheme, it could provide those countries with a lucrative new revenue stream as long as they can prove they are preserving it properly.