I 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.
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.
HA 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.
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.
PES, Present, and Future: the Year in Environmental Finance
2009 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.
2009 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.
Carbon 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
PARIS (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.