There is a new wave of entrepreneurs aiming to get rich by
saving the rainforests. Richard Lofthouse reports
Ever wanted to get rich by doing absolutely nothing? In a bizarre way that’s what a bunch of new entrepreneurs and large corporations are trying to do. The formula is ridiculously simple: buy up or lease a tract of rainforest, prop up a deckchair and watch it grow. Put a financial price on its mere existence and sell a range of ‘products’ – called ecosystem services – to polluters. If trees could hear, they’d be setting up trade unions.
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Washington to sell tab water to the middle east?Jun 25, 2009 : The Cosmopolis pulp mill, located near Aberdeen in Washington state, was closed by Weyerhaeuser in 2005. The city of Aberdeen now has 30 million gallons of water a day available that the pulp mill no longer requires.
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A profitable rainforest!(?)A MOST unusual document landed on your correspondent’s desk recently: a financial report from a rainforest. Iwokrama, a 370,000-hectare rainforest in central Guyana, announced that it was in profit. It added, more intriguingly, that rainforests had entered the “global economy”.
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Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) and REDD - Latin America in the leadThis fall, professionals in PES and REDD are headed south. From across the globe practitioners and policymakers in environmental markets are booking flights to Colombia, Costa Rica, Argentina, Bolivia, and Mexico to discuss the future of our world's ecosystems. In several cases, this is the first time that Latin America is serving as host to these international conferences on environmental markets. With a strengthening regional economy and four out of five of the world's most bio-diverse countries, Latin America is becoming a major player in REDD and PES.
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How to combat deforestation in central Brazil?“At regional and global levels, especially in inland Amazonia and other regions in southern central Brazil, if the rate of deforestation is not reduced, removal of plant cover can affect rainfall, as has been scientifically demonstrated.”
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Costing the Earth: Investing in protecting EcosystemsCoral reefs around the world are worth a staggering $172 billion dollars a year to the global economy. But the wealth of the oceans' reefs, and their amazing monetary value, is on the verge of being destroyed.
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Invest in nature now, save trillions laterPARIS (AFP) – Investing billions today to protect threatened ecosystems and dwindling biodiversity would reap trillions in savings over the long haul, according to a UN-backed report issued Friday.
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RAPP, REDD and indigenous peopleCarbon offset schemes like REDD have been a big part of the Copenhagen negotiations so far, but in practice they can go horribly wrong, reports Angela Dewan
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2009: a year in review of rainforest protection2009 may prove to be an important turning point for tropical forests.
Lead by Brazil, which had the lowest extent of deforestation since at least the 1980s, global forest loss likely declined to its lowest level in more than a decade. Critical to the fall in deforestation was the global financial crisis, which dried up credit for forest-destroying activities and contributed to a crash in commodity prices, an underlying driver of deforestation.
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PES, Present, and Future: the Year in Environmental Finance2009 opened with the formation of a new Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets and closed with a disappointing Copenhagen Accord that nonetheless included provisions for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. EM takes a brief look back on the year in PES and the decade it capped off.
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Forest project gets a boost Guwahati, Jan. 18: The French development agency, Agence Française de Développement, has given the go ahead to the Assam forest department to undertake a feasibility study of the Rs 450-crore Assam project on forestry and bio-diversity conservation.
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Guyana: US$700,000 avoided deforestation agreement signed
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Fink's green fund hires for agriculture investment
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Forests hold poverty solutionHA NOI — The forestry sector's biggest difficulty is to balance the relationship between hunger elimination and poverty reduction and its development, a conference heard yesterday in Ha Noi.
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Ecosystem services - it’s an easier concept to turn into practical actions than biodiversity"The climate alters the natural environments people are used to. Deciding what to protect is an ethical problem," says research scientist Markku Kanninen.
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Payments for Forest ConservationI spent a good chunk of last week working with US and Mexican colleagues, looking at data from a forest conservation program in Mexico. This “Payment for Environmental Services” (PES) program is in the highly threatened area where Monarch butterflies stay over winter.
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Will REDD Really Be Cheap? 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.
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US-Alaska: Why does Congress want to raid our best carbon bank?
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WTO: 2010 Focus on Natural Resources in World Trade ReportThe 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 ‘Trade in Natural Resources: Challenges in Global Governance“.
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Valuing Water and its Ecological Services in Rural Landscapes: A Case Study from Nepal
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Pavan Sukhdev: you can have progress without GDP-led growthDeutsche 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?
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Give decision makers access to the value of nature's servicesFinance ministers must realise that mounting devastation of ecosystems harms economic development
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No sale of forest environment services without gov’t say-soEnvironmental services provided by Guyana’s forests cannot be sold without the agreement of the government, Minister of Agriculture, Robert Persaud says.
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Vietnam Implementing Nationwide Payments for Forest Ecosystem ServicesThe 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.
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Setting up Nest: Acre, Brazil, and the Future of REDD22 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.
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Valuing natural capital for development decisions
DFID in its conceptual frameworks of Sustainable Livelihoods Approaches (SLAs) defines five types of asset: human capital, social capital (the ability to draw on support through membership of social groups), natural capital, physical capital, and financial capital for achieving poverty elimination. But most services provided by the natural environment (natural capital) to human society are not captured by GDP or other conventional macro-economic indicators, because, they are not directly traded in markets. Provisioning services (food, fibre and water) and a few cultural services (such as recreation and tourism) are somehow calculated but value of regulating services (water and climate regulation) is not calculated yet, although research on regulating services is developing rapidly.
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Forest protection scheme benefits 10,000 highland families
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Environment versus economy: local communities find economic benefits from living next to conservation areas
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Stacking Ecosystem Services Payments: Risks and Solutions  A wide variety of incentive programs and markets have arisen to pay landowners for ecosystem servi
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Ugandan Tribe Struggles to Maintain Forests and Access BenefitsIndigenous people like Uganda’s Bunyoro-Kitara tend to take good care of their land – and to lose big when someone else finds natural resources on it. Payments for ecosystem services (PES) offer a way to profit from good stewardship, but only if governments keep things clean. Unfortunately, tha
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Der WWF hat offensichtlich Erklärungsbedarf...
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WWF seems to have some demand for explanation in regard of it's operations in tropical countries.
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Selling Nature to Save Nature, and OurselvesTHE HAGUE, Jul 5, 2011 (IPS) - Avoiding the coming catastrophic nexus of climate change, food, water and energy shortages, along with worsening poverty, requires a global technological overhaul involving investments of 1.9 trillion dollars each year for the next 40 years, said experts from the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA) in Geneva Tuesday.
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GEF Approves Four REDD+ SFM Projects in New Funding Window for ForestsThe Global Environment Facility (GEF) has approvoved the first four projects to access incentive funds available for sustainable forest management (SFM) and REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries, as well as conservation, sustainable management
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Buyer, Regulator, and Enabler - The Government's Role in Ecosystem Services MarketsThis paper discusses the public sector's role in PES internationally. In general, the public sector's role in ecosystem services markets is both critical, and evolving. The public sector roles are evolving in three distinct ways:
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Valuing Nature's Services Today Is an Investment in the Future
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Putting a Price on the Ecosystem With Carbon CreditsHow much is a forest worth?
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Climate Conversations - Green the economy to check environmental degradationIn Pakistan, environmental degradation is both a cause and consequence of different socio-economic problems including deepening poverty, declining performance of different crops and worsening problems with human and crop diseases.
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Creating markets to pay for public good offer promise, perilOver the past 50 years, 60 percent of all ecosystem services have declined as a direct result of the conversion of land to the production of foods, fuels and fibers.
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Putting a Price on The Real Value of NatureHow do you put a price on the value of nature?
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Forest conservation policies: what works and what doesn’t Policymakers looking to reduce deforestation in their countries have the right tools to do so today, but without a solid foundation in good governance and consistent policies, they will not be successful, said a prominent policy expert.
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$780M eco-system protection fund launchThe Surinamese government has warned donors to stop treating the issue of eco-systems as mere handouts.
John Goedschalk, of Suriname’s Climate Compatible Development Agency, made the call on Monday during the launch of the Guyana Shield Facility, a fund to protect the ecosystems in the Guyana Shield region which includes Guyana, Suriname, Colombia and Brazil.
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Insights from the Field: Forests for Climate and TimberThe Carbon Canopy is a novel partnership among companies, landowners, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that seeks to leverage markets for ecosystem services to increase the area of southern U.S. forests certified as sustainably managed.
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Stacking Ecosystem Services Payments: Risks and SolutionsHealthy ecosystems provide many services to society, including water filtration, biodiversity habitat protection, and carbon sequestration.
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Forest and Climate Conservation for the private Sector
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Lessons for REDDplus: A comparative analysis of the German discourse on forest functions and the global ecosystem services debateThis paper compares the historic German discourse on forest functions with the current international debate on ecosystem services and analyzes the factors that may have triggered or inhibited the development and the institutionalization of both underlying concepts and subordinate debates.
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ITTO Supports Development of Forest Planning Model in GuyanaMarch 2012: The Reducing Deforestation and Forest Degradation and Enhancing Environmental Services in Tropical Forests (REDDES) Programme of the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) has provided support to Guyana to develop a high-level decision support model for forestry.
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South-South Learning: From Payments for Environmental Services to REDD+ in Latin America
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Pricing natural assets could spur green growth - World BankDeclining stocks of forests, farmland, fish and other natural resources threaten to derail economic growth around the world and curb progress against poverty, the World Bank warned on Wednesday.
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Rio+20 Dialogues: Water scarcity under a changing climate, can forests help win the battle? Despite recent research that has closely linked climate change and water scarcity with a rapidly rising deforestation rates, the international climate community still mainly thinks of forests in terms of their carbon storage potential rather than the critical role they play in regulating rainfall
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Code REDD for environmental protectionUp to now a forest’s value has been measured mainly in terms of the price of its wood, but the United Nations is currently turning this premise on its head by placing a price on the forest’s capacity to absorb the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
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FORMA and fCPR: Accelerating a Performance-Based Payment System for REDD+ Reducing carbon emissions from forest clearing and degradat
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Pricing nature's freebies
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Response to George Monbiot: The valuation of nature and ecosystem services is not privatizationThe idea of placing a value on the environment to encourage its protection has become increasingly popular, but critics say it amounts to little more than the privatisation. We asked three experts in the field to answer this charge – here’s their response.
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Growing benefits from forest carbon projects
Corporate responsibility managers should take a look at forest carbon offset projects to maximize return on investment in climate, biodiversity, and community benefits
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Issue date: September 28th, 2012; Oct 19, 2012 Biodiversity Offsets: : Voluntary and Compliance Regimes UNEP-WCMC and UNEP FI have issued a new publica
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