Australia drew the ire of the environmental community when it backed away from its carbon pricing program last year and established a nearly AU$2.6 billion Emissions Reduction Fund in its place. With the first auction coming up this week, critical issues still need to be resolved, including whether the funding will be sufficient to incentivize…
Ecosystem Marketplace
Ecosystem Marketplace
Wednesday In Lima: Indigenous Organizations To Propose Use Of Life Plan Success As Benchmark For REDD+
by Steve Zwick • • 0 Comments
Peruvian indigenous organization FENAMAD says it’s time to start using indigenous life plans as a benchmark of REDD+ success. On Wednesday, they will present their ideas at a side event in Lima. 1 December 2014 | Indigenous people across the Amazon have created “Life Plans” to dock their traditional economies and ways of life with…
Climate Blah-Blah, Ecosystem Marketplace
INDCs, REDD+, And The Alphabet Soup Of COP
by Steve Zwick • • 0 Comments
Year-end climate talks begin next week in Lima, and they’ve been preceded by the usual torrent of reports and prognostications. We’ve sifted through much of it, and here we’ve compiled those explainers that we think do the best job of navigating the morass. If you need another reminder of how badly our media are…
Ecosystem Marketplace, Finance
Protected: The Separatist, The Salesman, And The Scientists: What A Forgotten Experiment Tells Us About REDD
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Ecosystem Marketplace
Zombies, Aliens, And The IPCC
by Steve Zwick • • 0 Comments
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change delivered another clear, concise, and science-based analysis of the climate challenge this weekend. Chock-full of dire warnings and hopeful solutions, it reminds us again that we can fix this mess, even as evidence mounts that we won’t. Here’s a quick look at the latest findings in a sad saga…
Ecosystem Marketplace
Building Carbon Markets From Soot
by Kelley Hamrick • • 0 Comments
Smoke-induced illnesses caused by the use of traditional cookstoves kill more than 7,500 Nepalese women and children die every year – a tragic fact the Nepalese government is trying to address by pursuing a goal of clean cooking for all by 2017. Here’s how a clean cookstoves program created by Dutch development organization SNV is…
Ecosystem Marketplace
2007: The Year Indonesia Went REDD (Sort Of)
by Steve Zwick • • 0 Comments
Indonesia’s federal government has embarked on the most ambitious REDD program of any major forested nation. It’s a program that began to take root in 2007 but it’s not easy to implement such a program in a land of a thousand islands spread across two million square kilometers. After their first meeting with Todd Lemons…
Ecosystem Marketplace
Biodiversity And REDD: How They Fit Together
by Steve Zwick • • 0 Comments
Never before have we known as much about the synergies between forest carbon and biodiversity as we do now, but that knowledge has been hidden beneath layers of impenetrable gobbledygook. A new sourcebook aims to fix that by scraping away the jargon and connecting dots previously visible only to experts. More importantly, it succeeds. 22…
Ecosystem Marketplace
Green Food Key To Success At Global Biodiversity Talks
by Steve Zwick • • 0 Comments
Four years ago, the Convention on Biological Diversity set 20 goals for itself. Known collectively as the Aichi Targets, they focused more on ways to tweak our economic system to take the pressure off of fragile habitat than on grandiose but groundless numerical achievements. Many of those targets are now closer than they appear. …
Ecosystem Marketplace
Verified Conservation Areas: A Real-Estate Market For Biodiversity?
by Kelley Hamrick • • 0 Comments
There are markets for silver and there are markets for houses, and it doesn’t take a genius to see the difference between the two: an ounce of silver is an ounce of silver, interchangeable with any other ounce of the same quality, but the value of a house – or any piece of property –…
Ecosystem Engineering, Ecosystem Marketplace
How The Tolo River People Of Colombia Harnessed Carbon Finance To Save Their Rainforest
by Tanya Dimitrova • • 0 Comments
Colombia’s Tolo River People collectively own 32,000 acres of rainforest, and that forest feeds the river on which they depend. But ownership means nothing if you can’t protect it. Four years ago, the decided to start harnessing carbon finance to save the forest and preserve their way of life. This is their story. 28 July…
Ecosystem Marketplace
Results-Based Finance: Breakthrough Or Backslide?
by Kelley Hamrick • • 0 Comments
Everyone loves “results-based finance” – at least in the abstract – because everyone likes to get what they paid for. Quantifying those results and packaging them for buyers, however, has proven elusive once you get beyond payments for ecosystem services. Here’s a look back on the evolution of results-based finance. 16 July 2014 | The…
Ecosystem Engineering, Ecosystem Marketplace
Wrestling With Orangutans: How Private Conservation Saved The Seruyan Forest
by Steve Zwick • • 0 Comments
As a former collegiate wrestler, Todd Lemons knew the look of an eager athlete ready to grapple, and these orangutans had that look in spades. He encountered them in the forest behind Orangutan Foundation International‘s (OFI) orphanage in Pangkalan Bun, on the island of Borneo. All were adolescents who had witnessed the murder of one or both of…
Ecosystem Marketplace
Todd Lemons: Ecosystem Entrepreneur
by Steve Zwick • • 0 Comments
When Todd Lemons showed up on Birutė Galdikas’s doorstep in 2007, she had no idea who he was or why he’d come all the way to Borneo on a hunch. They ended up forging a partnership that saved the Seruyan Forest and provided a template for others to follow suit. Todd Lemons spent 15 years working…
Ecosystem Marketplace
Green Pledges Hinge On Procurement Agents And Consumers
by Jennifer Baldwin • • 0 Comments
Executives around the world are vowing to woo customers by going green – embarking on a trail that companies like paper giant Domtar blazed a decade ago. But it’s consumers whose choices will ripple up the production chain, through procurement to finance. Here’s how that process works – and why good intentions will come to…
Ecosystem Marketplace
How A Primatologist, An Industrialist, And An Ecosystem Entrepreneur Took On Big Palm Oil And Won
by Steve Zwick • • 0 Comments
When world-renowned primatologist Biruté Galdikas learned that palm oil company PT Best was about to destroy Borneo’s Seruyan Forest, she thought all was lost. Then she met ecosystem entrepreneur Todd Lemons and industrialist Rusmin Widjajam. Here’s how they blended cutting-edge finance and old-fashioned moxie to outmaneuver Big Palm Oil and save the forest. Pak Ahmed…
Ecosystem Marketplace
Brazilian Indigenes Earn Millions By Saving Endangered Rainforest
by Steve Zwick • • 0 Comments
Chief Tojtxi never forgot his first, furtive contact with the invaders. “We saw traces of the whites, and fled into the forest,” he told Survival International a few years back. “The whites saw our footsteps and followed us. We went further and further away, but the whites came to our village, and we left our…
