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.
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.
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 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“.
On its face, the bill is my-eyes-glaze-over routine: H.R. 2099 and companion bill S. 881 "will provide for the settlement of certain claims under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, and for other purposes." The bill will permit an Alaskan Native corporation, Sealaska, to complete lands selection process granted under a 1971 law. Sealaska needs the Congressional decision because it wants to choose lands outside the original boundaries of the Act. If the bill passes, Sealaska will be permitted to log 80,000 acres of the Tongass National Forest.
An international system that enables countries to earn carbon credits by reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) will almost certainly be a prominent feature of whatever post-2012 international climate architecture emerges from ongoing negotiations.
