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Bucking the Bush administration's position that tougher rules would harm the U.S. economy, Fortune 500 companies including General Electric Co., Duke Energy Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. in recent months have championed stronger government measures to reduce industrial releases of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas that scientists have linked to rising temperatures and sea levels.

New logging permits were suspended Friday in a huge Amazon state where the rain forest is being cleared at an ever increasing rate, a day after police launched a crackdown on official corruption.

Here is a list of some of the partnerships between the United Nations and corporations.

Ben & Jerry's "Lick Global Warming" campaign. Last month, in protest against the US government's proposed drilling for oil in Jerry Greenfield -- co-founder of Ben and jerry's is serious about preventing climate change. To protest the Arctic National Wildlife Park, the company made a 1,000lb Baked Alaska and left it to melt outside the Capitol. They've also has set up a Climate Change College, which, each year for three years, will train six spokespeople for the cause.

More companies are beginning to see the benefits of having energy-efficient buildings and physical plants. Cleaner, more efficient office buildings and work spaces not only help the environment but can save a company money, improving that company's -- as well as all of society's -- bottom line.

Bush's air pollution plan is a sweetheart deal for polluters and is on a fast track in the Senate.

Every spring, activists and investors attend annual general meetings to protest and meet face-to-face with CEOs and corporate boards. The goal is to place their agendas -- on everything from the environment to labor practices -- front and center.

Environmentalists estimate around 2.5 million acres of rainforest were compromised or destroyed in Texaco's search for oil in Ecuador. It is a disaster that has left the jungle ravaged and its people dying of cancer.

An increasing number of NGOs are entering corporate alliances to achieve their campaigning aims. Tobias Webb considers the example of Greenpeace.

Partnership programs are proliferating in the UN system, often before guidelines can be put in place, and before the implications of the partnerships are understood.

Are World Bank-funded efforts to compensate for corporate emissions sustainable? Or will they affect poor communities disproportionately?

Traders are gearing up for a new futures market. These new carbon exchanges promise billions in potential profit, but will they save the planet?

Kimberly-Clark is a tissue product manufacturer that relies on massive amounts of virgin fibre to produce its products - it uses over 2.5 million tonnes of virgin tree pulp each year and less than 19% of its fibre in North America comes from recycled sources.

In the woods at the fringe of this Western Maryland town, a mountain of waste 50 feet high is slouching into a creek that's tinted an eerie orange. The "gob pile" is refuse from a long-abandoned coal mine. And the stream into which it's eroding, Winebrenner Run, is devoid of life - one of the state's worst cases of sulfuric acid pollution from mines.