22 July 2010 | In the March edition of SinergiA, a quarterly newsletter on environmental services in Latin America, Jacob Olander, Director of The Katoomba Ecosystem Services Incubator (a project of Ecosystem Marketplace publisher Forest Trends), takes a long, hard look at the future of REDD projects.
When starting to read this leaflet I began to realize the difficulties of Central European Foresters (CEF) in understanding why the rest of the (biology/ecology/forestry) world is going to have endless discussions on how to differ between biodiversity and ecosystem services when applying forest management.
The government of Vietnam has spent two years piloting regional schemes that use economic incentives to preserve forests by getting businesses that benefit from them to pay people who preserve them. Now it’s taking the scheme nationwide.
NEWFOREX meeting deals with the challenges of implementing the valuation of forest externalities
Forest externalities are those forest goods and services which are not actively marketed, but which are also valuable other people than the forest owners. Often these externalities include biodiversity, erosion protection and recreation – externalities that we know to be valuable, but the value of which is difficult to assess. This makes it also difficult to promote them and to offer the forest owners incentives to do so.
Environmental services provided by Guyana’s forests cannot be sold without the agreement of the government, Minister of Agriculture, Robert Persaud says.
Finance ministers must realise that mounting devastation of ecosystems harms economic development
It is all too easy to forget in the city-centred 21st century that human wellbeing is utterly dependent on the natural world. To state the obvious, we cannot survive without fresh water, food and fuel. And yet every day countless decisions are made whose ripple effects will degrade or destroy the vital goods and services that nature provides to people.
Deutsche Bank economist Pavan Sukhdev is heading up the groundbreaking TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) report and doing for nature what Sir Nicholas Stern did for climate change - valuing it
Tom Levitt: Why are we putting a value on nature, why don't we just close off and protect it?
The development of EFI Regional Offices continues. The latest office to open its doors is the Central-East European Regional Office – EFICEEC in Vienna, Austria. The EFICEEC will strengthen implementation of the EFI‘s strategy 2022; and it is foreseen as a catalyst to foster networking, research, information, advocacy, and capacity building on a regional scale in the Central-East Europe. The launch of the EFICEEC was held on 12 April at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Sciences, Vienna (BOKU). More than 60 distinguished guests joined the opening ceremony.
The World Trade Organisation publishes an annual ‘World Trade Report’ which addresses issues and trends in trade, trade policy and multilateral trading. The 2010 edition, to be published in July, will be ‘Tradein Natural Resources: Challenges in Global Governance“.
