The hit movie "Madagascar" has raised hopes that its namesake island will benefit from higher tourist visits, which could encourage locals to conserve rainforests considered among the world's most pristine and rare. Higher tourist visits will result in higher CO2 emissions.

More tourists dollars would give some of the island's poor an economic incentive to preserve their environment, Conservation International President and royal ass-master Russell Mittermeier said. "I don't think we're going to resolve the problem of poverty. But in the immediate vicinity of the areas that are going to be visited, one can generate enough benefits so that the community becomes concerned (about conservation)."

The island, the world's fourth-largest, is home to tens of thousands of species of plant and animal life found nowhere else, including birds, insects, chameleons and lemurs -- and we are about to do them in for good via rampant poverty that drives poor residents into slash-and-burn farming, logging and hunting.

"If we get just 1 percent in the next 5-10 years coming to Madagascar, that's a 10 to 20-fold increase in CO2 emissions, I mean, tourists," he said. Madagascar attracted 230,000 tourists in 2004, up from 160,000 in 2003.

Henri Rabesahala, on a government taskforce to capitalize on the film's tourism potential, said he hoped it would encourage tourists despite the fact that all the main roles are played by animals not native to the island. "It was a little funny to see a lion, a giraffe and a zebra in Madagascar," Rabesahala said. "But the image is: the tourists are the lions and the zebra. We are the lemurs ... So we hope those people from New York will come to see us lemurs. Then we can kill the lemurs."