Biodiversity

COPENHAGEN, Dec.

Coral 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.

This 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.

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”.

June 29, 2009: Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva last week signed a controversial law granting 67.4 million hectares (166 million acres) of Amazon rainforest land to more than 1 million illegal settlers, reports Reuters.