Fancy your own swath of rainforest or snow-capped peak? From Britain to Botswana, the Philippines to Patagonia, there is an explosion of individuals, charities, even billionaire financiers buying up vast areas of land in the name of protecting environments. But is private ownership the way to save them? John Vidal reports

US millionaire conservationist Douglas Tompkins, who owns several million acres in Patagonia. Photograph: Leo Beca/Reuters

Click! I have just bought 10 sq cm of rainforest for a few pennies on the net. Click click! That’s 0.2 sq ft of Patagonia coastline saved from mining. Click click click! A friend has just given me as a present 1 sq m of the Palmyra atoll, wherever that is.

Saving the world’s most beautiful and ecologically important places just got much cheaper and easier. Hundreds of websites run by charities, trusts, and individuals now invite people to buy up forest, field and mountain to save it from destruction and climate change at the click of a mouse. And why stop at pennies? The World Land Trust, whose patron is Sir David Attenborough, invites you to buy a whole acre of Indian elephant corridor for £50, or 2,000m2 of the Chaco Pantanal in Brazil for £25. WLT supporters have bought 350,000 acres in Britain since 1989 - an area half the size of Derbyshire.

If you have really deep pockets, conservation gets even easier. John Eliasch, the Swedish-born businessman chosen by Gordon Brown to be his forest advisor, bought himself 400,000 acres of the Amazon rainforest for £8m in 2006 and now asks supporters to help him buy up tracts of Brazil and Ecuador. His charity, Cool Earth, is asking £70 an acre, and in one year it claims to have bought 32,000 acres - to howls of disapproval from the Brazilian government, which says Eliasch is an “eco-colonialist” and that Brazilians can look after their own forests.

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