The Kyoto treaty allows countries to plant trees to help meet their carbon dioxide emission reduction targets. According to the study's authors, this encourages countries that continue deforestation to plant new trees for carbon credit, but does nothing for countries that actually preserve their forests. The authors worry that countries may want to cap and trade, or put a cap on deforestation and trade in that piece that hasn't been deforested.

While this does stand out as a major flaw in the protocol, this also seems like quite a stretch. Yet, maybe it would be a good idea to establish a system in which countries could get credits for maintaining forests. Ideas such as these will probably be debated at a series of international meetings on climate change this year at the United Nations in Washington and Bali.

Before the Bali meeting in December, Indonesia – the country with the fastest pace of deforestation between 2000 and 2005, according to Greenpeace – plans to plant 79 million trees in one day. That's a lot of trees, and a situation that I could see the study's authors worrying about.

Southeast Asia as a whole is one of the world's top greenhouse gas emitters due to deforestation, peatland degradation and forest fires. Destruction of tropical forests accounts for 20 to 25 percent of world carbon emissions, acting as a major force for climate change.

But we can't completely blame the developing nations – isn't it the developed nations that buy up that wood? Figuring out a better way to curb the complex problem of deforestation and justly reward smart forestry could potentially slow climate change in one fell swoop.