Tools for the Tides
Exploring Coastal and Marine Markets
By Ecosystem Marketplace, Forest Trends, Katoomba Group View PublicationGlobal climate-change talks in Copenhagen might not have yielded a new greenhouse-gas protocol, but they did yield an agreement on the need to develop financing mechanisms that reward people in developing countries for saving their rainforests and adopting sustainable landuse practices both of which can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by capturing carbon in trees and soil. Meanwhile, scores of projects across both the developed and developing worlds are using environmental finance to preserve endangered species, improve water quality, and preserve wetlands all based on the premise that nature’s living ecosystems deliver valuable services that make them worth more alive than dead. Now it’s time to expand this reasoning to the ocean, where fish are vanishing, coasts are eroding, and algae are having a field day.