Brazil on Thursday unveiled long-awaited details of a plan to pay countries to preserve their tropical forests and announced it had already drawn $5.5 billion in pledges.

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The fund is President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's flagship project as he welcomes world leaders to the edge of the Amazon for the United Nations annual climate summit — an effort to draw attention and money to the imperiled rainforest crucial to curbing global warming.

Financed by interest-bearing debt instead of donations, the fund, dubbed the Tropical Forests Forever Facility, seeks to turn the economic logic of deforestation on its head by making it more lucrative for governments to keep their trees rather than cut them down.

Although destroying rainforest

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