Costing the Earth: Investing in protecting Ecosystems
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.
“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.”
Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) and REDD - Latin America in the lead
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”.
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.
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.
