While microfinance models have been hugely successful on a global scale in providing the means for people to escape extreme poverty, they aren’t often used to finance payments for ecosystem services projects that offer many poverty alleviating benefits. Despite it being risky and costly, both sectors see potential in working together on a larger scale.
Two steps forward: Green Assets’ South-Carolina based improved forest management project received its first forest carbon offset issuance for the California market, and Finite Carbon registered new compliance projects in New York and New Hampshire. Two steps back: The first national-level REDD+ Agency in Indonesia may be absorbed into a climate change mitigation directorate, and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has appointed a “chainsaw queen” and a climate change denier to top posts.
Indigenous people – and forest people in general – have long been among the planet’s most responsible stewards of the land. They’ve contributed the least to the global climate crisis, yet will suffer the most from its effects. REDD offers a way to rectify this injustice – and here’s how some indigenous leaders hope to make it work.
Como observador del relativamente largo plazo del proceso de las Naciones Unidas sobre el cambio climático, Gena Gammie de la Iniciativa del Agua de Forest Trends ‘ ve valor en el documento internacional a salir de Lima el mes pasado, pero recuerda a los lectores de la importancia de la innovadora acción climática a nivel […]
As the constraint on natural resources increases, the public and private sector are becoming more receptive to holistic nature-based solutions to address infrastructure and other challenges. Ecosystem Marketplace noticed particular growth in this area as it looks back over the year.
Voluntary initiatives and integration were big topics of the biodiversity space in 2014. In the US, regulators and landowners grappled with new methods to protect dwindling species population in the face of encroaching development. Meanwhile, the international world continued to push for meaningful biodiversity conservation through a merging of agendas.
How to measure a year? You’ll have to wait for our data collection to conclude in the New Year to find out how many tonnes of forest-based emissions reductions were financed in 2014, but for now we’ll take stock of the year’s major developments, which ranged from the triumphant to the tragic.
The Lima Call for Action set a procedure for countries to submit their contributions to fighting climate change, but the guidance on how to include land-use is thin so far. In other news, private investors have committed $365 million to restore 20 million hectares in Latin America and the Caribbean, a REDD+ pilot in Tanzania is stalling as it waits on a second phase of investment and an airplane laser-beamed an Alaskan forest to measure its carbon.
The climate community went to Peru and left with the Lima Call for Climate Action, the Green Climate Fund finally found a fraction of its funding and carbon dioxide fades into obscurity like a childhood celebrity.
The Lima Climate Talks wrapped up early Sunday morning with a bare-bones agreement on what constitutes a valid Intended Nationally-Determined Contribution (INDC) and a roadmap to year-end talks in 2015 that will begin with bottom-up proposals from countries and hopefully end with a convergence in Paris. With so little detail on INDCs, countries will have to step up individually by March.