Poverty Reduction - Deforestation, Poverty & Economic Dependency

10/24/11 - Huffington POST | Anyone looking at Brazil on the map sees a huge swath of green, which symbolizes a country that is blessed by natural resources and a true environmental power.

If clearing tropical forests for agriculture is a major cause of the ongoing catastrophic decline in biodiversity, conventional thinking would have us believe that reducing the number of farms and allowing the forests to expand should help reverse that decline, at least locally.

Sept. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Restoring and preserving dry-land forests can help provide food and fertilizer on small farms and prevent the recurrence of famine in Kenya and other African countries, a research group said.

The decision by leaders of the Sub Central of the Indigenous Territory and National Isiboro Secure Park (TIPNIS), to initiate a 500-kilometre protest march on Bolivia's capital of La Paz capital has ignited much debate about the nature of Bolivia’s first indigenous led-government.

How do you value an ecosystem? Putting a dollar value on natural systems such as forests has long beset economists.

Forests provide “non-use values,” such as the pleasure of knowing that a natural system exists, and recreational values, such as hunting, fishing and wildlife viewing. But recently, ecologists have also sought to value a broader set of “ecosystem services,” or the goods and services that ecosystems provide to a market economy.