…as an economist by training, Mr. Jagdeo is a persuasive advocate for new ways of looking at the economic value of forests. Right now, he suggests, too many countries put no dollar value at all on their standing forests. So any payment they get from harvesting trees is seen as a clear profit. If forests are correctly valued — for the carbon they sequester and the damage they spare the planet — then there is far more to gain from leaving them in tact.

While the global carbon market bandwagon rolls along, new deals based on sequestered carbon through avoided deforestation continue to fall into place on the ground.  CarbonPositive reports on an agreement by the regional government of Papua, Indonesia, to set aside one million hectares of forest in order to create reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) carbon credits.  The project, brokered by an Australian company, New Forests, is based on the government of Papua rescinding the logging and agribusiness status of the land, and will sell its carbon credits on the voluntary market.  As with other recent emerging deals of this sort, it remains unclear at first glance exactly how revenue will be routed, how local communities will benefit from the deal, and whether or not the presumed market demand for the carbon credits will actually take shape.

Meanwhile, the World Bank and several partner organizations have established a new web site for the Communities, Conservation, and Markets project, which aims to collect and disseminate information on payments for environmental services and other community-based conservation market issues and opportunities.

The journal Ecological Economics ran a special edition on PES in its May 1, 2008 issue. The issue includes 15 articles on PES, ranging from conceptual overviews to detailed case studies from Bolivia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, the United States, the EU, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.

Meanwhile, earlier in the week Ecosystem Marketplace and New Carbon Finance released their 2008 State of the Voluntary Carbon Markets report, the second such annual report on the growing voluntary carbon market following last year’s compilation.  The report details the rapid growth of the voluntary carbon market over the past 12 months.  The volume of CO₂ emission reductions traded on the over-the-counter market nearly tripled from 14.3 million tons of CO₂ equivalent in 2006 to 42.1 MtCO₂e in 2007.  The value of this trade increased from $58.5 million to $285.4 million over the same period.  These figures reflect the fact that prices for carbon off-sets on the voluntary market continue to rise, with the volume-weighted price of credits increasing from $4.1 tCO₂e to $6.1 tCO₂e from 2006 to 2007.

The expansion of markets for carbon off-sets and related ecological services (e.g. water catchment) presents tremendous new opportunities for creating economic incentives for conservation from forests and grasslands around the world.  Of course, not everyone is confident that these market-based strategies will bring more benefits than costs.  Some indigenous rights groups in particular have recently been critical of existing carbon off-set projects set up under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism. 

In terms of conservation outcomes, it is clear that carbon off-set projects can have either negative or positive impacts depending on how they are structured.  They can create incentives for conservation if they structure off-sets in terms of reducing deforestation or through re-foresting previously denuded landscapes, and if they are able to channel benefits to local communities who are, in many instances, the ultimate determinants of forest conditions.  By contrast, if off-setting carbon means clearing native vegetation and replacing it with exotic plantations or producing biofuel monocultures, the impact will clearly be negative.  The ultimate impact that the carbon markets have on conservation outcomes lies in the nuance of how off-set deals are structured and how the market captures bundled biodiversity, community, and carbon emission reduction values. 

Coming back to the range?

While the bison is demographically abundant, the species remains mostly functionally extinct across its original range, which ran from Alaska to Sonora and Oregon to the Appalachians.  An essay in the April, 2008, edition of Conservation Biology, authored by 28 biologists, conservationists, and local landholders and Native American leaders, provides a bold and ambitious vision for restoring the bison to ecosystems across the continent.  The essay, titled ‘The Ecological Future of the North American Bison: Conceiving Long-term, Large-scale Conservation of Wildlife’, is an output of a collaborative process facilitated by the Wildlife Conservation Society.  (more…)

The chronology of this debate is roughly as follows. Last year, India revised its tiger population estimates downwards by about a half- to only about 1,300-1,500 wild animals. The current population of adult breeding tigers in all of Asia may now be as low as 2,500. An article in Bioscience last year on ‘The Fate of Wild Tigers’ estimated that the tiger range may have contracted by 41% over the past decade. Importantly, only about a quarter of the known tiger range lies within the confines of protected areas. The vast majority is outside parks where tigers co-exist with local people.

Wild tigers are declining while debate over conservation stategies intensifies.

In the face of these discouraging trends, controversy erupted over new proposals coming from China to initiate a legal trade in farmed tiger products preceding the 14^th Conference of Parties of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which was held in The Hague. A major source of tiger population decline has always been poaching for tiger bone, which is used in traditional Chinese medicine and is a highly coveted product. China formally banned the trade in tiger bones in 1993, largely due to international pressure. Since then, though, the country’s domestic tiger population has grown to about 4,000-5,000 animals in captivity.

A combination of Chinese tiger farmers, sustainable use advocates, and pro-trade groups have started calling for a controlled trade in harvested tiger products as a conservation strategy. In August, 2006, Barun Mitra, an Indian libertarian economist, wrote an editorial (‘Sell the Tiger to Save it’) in The New York Times calling for a trade-based approach to tiger conservation. While claiming that a single farmed tiger could be worth up to $40,000 in terms of products like bones and skins, Mitra observed that “for the last 30 years, the tiger has been priced at zero, while millions of dollars have been spent to protect it and prohibit trade that might in fact help save the species.” (more…)

A recent paper in the on-line journal Ecology and Society, however, provides a bit of a reality check for proponents of PES, and highlights some of the practical barriers that these strategies will have to overcome.  The paper, aptly titled ‘When Donors Get Cold Feet: the Community Conservation Concession in Setulang (Kalimantan, Indonesia) that Never Happened’, describes the failure to implement a novel PES pilot initiative in one of Borneo’s more intact community forests. 

Setulang village, in the Malinau River watershed, possesses about 5,000 hectares of locally protected primary forest, which the village has struggled to protect in the face of incursions from commercial logging operations based in surrounding villages. Recognizing the community’s commitment to conserving their forest as well as some of the challenges they faced and the probability that the temptation to allow commercial logging will rise in the near future, a several outsiders, led by staff from the Centre for International Forestry Research, approached the village with a PES proposal. 

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Adams is one of the leading historians of the international conservation movement, and the paper provides a concise background of how cultural ideas about nature and wilderness shaped the initial creation of parks and game reserves in places like colonial Africa. The authors also review the social impacts- both positive and negative- of protected areas on local communities and indigenous people, and the resurgence of advocates for ‘hard parks’ that seek to exclude human influences during the past decade or so. The paper concludes by summarizing six overarching themes in conservation’s contemporary political ecology, including the growing influence of international conservation organizations, neo-liberal ideas about economic development, and both external and internal self-criticism shaping conservation ideas today. (more…)

One set of trends revolves around ongoing changes in global commodity markets. Higher oil prices and the search for alternative fuels is leading to surging demand for biofuels and ethanol. This growing demand influences the Amazon in multiple ways. Higher ethanol prices have led to an expansion in the area of land used for corn in the United States, thereby displacing soya production. Increasing demand for bio-diesel is also leading to increased production of sugarcane in southern Brazil, which also displaces soya production to agricultural frontiers to the north, in the Amazon region. All of this leads to increased demand for land for soya farming, which is further driven by the increasing affluence of countries like China and their growing demand for meat, since soya is a leading source of livestock feed. Expanding soya production generally does not directly lead to deforestation, but displaces more marginal cattle production, pushing ranches further into forested areas. (more…)

Since 1996, jaguars have been recorded again in the US-Mexico borderlands.

With the re-discovery of the Americas’ largest felid in the United States, at least as transients, a range of new cross-border conservation initiatives have emerged during the past decade. While some environmental organizations continue to campaign for stricter habitat protections under the U.S. Endangered Species Act for the jaguar in the U.S. borderlands, the fate of this sub-population primarily hinges on developing effective conservation strategies in the animals’ northern Mexico home range.

The Winter 2007 edition of PERC Reports, published by the Property and Environment Research Center out of Bozeman, Montana, contains an article describing the emergence of several conservation initiatives using collaborative and incentive-based strategies to conserve this jaguar population. (more…)

“Whenever we pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” noted John Muir over a century ago, in one of the earlier recorded observations on the inherent complexity of life on earth. As human knowledge has accumulated and the complexity, not only of ecological systems’ biophysical components but of their social, cultural, and institutional dimensions as well, it has become increasingly apparent that our way of organizing knowledge along disciplinary boundaries- particularly the relatively hard boundary between social and natural sciences- greatly limits our understanding of the world.During the past twenty years, an ambitious group of scientists called the Resilience Alliance has emerged to try and develop a truly integrative framework for thinking about complex systems, which they tellingly refer to as ‘social ecological systems’ in recognition of the counterproductive nature of treating human and biophysical components separately. As the group’s work has grown and expanded, they have developed a web site and blog, a thick edited volume describing their ideas called Panarchy (Island Press, 2002), and an on-line scientific journal titled Ecology and Society.

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