Jakarta – Indonesia has proposed that eight countries home to some 80 percent of the world's tropical rainforests join diplomatic ranks amid rising climate change concerns, a senior official said Saturday.

"This is the initiative of our president, in order that they be able to play an important role in the diplomacy of global warming," the spokesman for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono told AFP.

"It's important for the eight countries to have a joint consensus on their contribution to efforts to control global warming," spokesman Dino Patti Djalal said, adding that the group would look at how forest conservation can happen in tandem with economic development.

Indonesia will open a meeting of the eight countries on September 24 in New York in parallel with the UN's annual plenary session, he added. The eight countries are Brazil, Cameroon, Congo, Costa Rica, Gabon, Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea, but more could join, Djalal separately told the Jakarta Post.

The newspaper reported that the grouping was a response to flaws in the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing global carbon emissions, which focuses more on emissions from industry and overlooks forestry. "The point is that we, the rainforest countries, want to ensure that we will have full ownership of our forests," Djalal was quoted as saying.

He said that "the initiatives on rainforest conservation with regards to climate change have always come from developed countries... The president wants to change this situation."

Indonesia is hosting a United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) conference on the island of Bali in December. Its 191 member states are to discuss climate commitments for the period following 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol expires.

Indonesia is believed to be the world's third largest producer of carbon emissions largely due to forest fires and massive illegal logging across the archipelago nation.