The Annual Meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation
ATBC 2008 - Evening Lecture 12 June.htm
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Evening Pleanry Lecture
Thursday 12 June, 19:30-20:30, Torarica Royall Hall
Mitchell, Andrew (Global Canopy Programme)
Global ecosystem services trading: a new market solution to stabilize climate and conserve biodiversity
Payments for ecosystem services such as watershed protection and biodiversity provision are increasingly popular, but tend to be based on donor funding or taxes, and so may not provide the level of funds needed to protect tropical forests. Climate change mitigation will eventually include international payments for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). However, reforesting nations like Costa Rica and India might not be compensated for past efforts, while those with low rates of deforestation such as Guyana would not qualify. This could create perverse incentives for deforestation. Therefore, we propose that the global community consider investing in the ecosystem services generated by tropical forests and enjoyed over regional to global scales. Tropical forests interact with the atmosphere and deliver – in addition to the storage of carbon – services that are thought to include the pumping of water vapour from oceans to land and the generation and recycling of rainfall. Recent work highlights the potential effects of deforestation on global rainfall patterns. We hypothesise that the threat of climate change will in the future generate a global willingness to pay for such regional to global ecosystem services. Focusing on a case study in the Iwokrama Reserve in Guyana, we illustrate a novel potential financial mechanism by which investors such as banks and insurance companies can trade in these services, thereby going beyond philanthropy.
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