Word: forest
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...fear that the ibis will forsake Trinidad. "We'd hunt them in the early morning," says Seth, a 21-year-old swamp tour guide and reformed poacher who asked that his real name not be used for fear of jeopardizing the future career he hopes to have with the forest service. "We would leave a piece of red cloth near the roots of the mangroves," he said, where the ibis feeds on crabs, from whose shells they get the carotenes that turn their feathers scarlet. "They think they see their friend down there and they follow," explains Seth, who would...
...Mitchell and some of his friends in the London financial community are trying to fix what he calls a "market failure." On March 28 the financial group Canopy Capital announced that it would pay the Iwokrama forest reserve in the tiny South American country of Guyana in return for ownership of the forest's ecosystem services and a claim on any profits that might one day be made on them. Canopy Capital wouldn't say how big the deal was, but the firm's managing director Hylton Philipson said it would cover a significant chunk of the reserve...
...move is unprecedented. Private companies in the past have been involved in "avoided deforestation," compensating rain-forest nations to refrain from cutting down their trees in exchange for carbon credits. (Some 15 million hectares of rain forest are destroyed each year, accounting for some 20% of the carbon emissions annually, as burned or cut-down trees release their sequestered carbon into the atmosphere.) But Canopy Capital is the first firm to try to put a market price on all the other ecosystem services provided by a healthy rain forest. Humans have been availing themselves of those services for nothing, like...
...bold bet. Right now there is no price set on those rain-forest services, because no market exists to price them. Canopy Capital isn't buying land, and it is essentially paying the Iwokrama reserve for a good that it can't really trade. That sounds an awful lot like philanthropy, but Mitchell and Philipson insist this is capitalism. For now, Canopy will pay simply to protect Iwokrama's ecosystem services, but in the future it's wagering that the world will get desperate enough to limit climate change - and deforestation - that it will pay Canopy for its stake...
...certainly possible that moves like Canopy Capital's could begin to generate a real market in the environmental services provided by rain forests. Tropical nations like Brazil and Indonesia, long wary about the impact that international trading could have on their sovereign forests, are beginning to see that markets could be a win-win, allowing them to keep their trees and capitalize on them. For the rest of the world, stopping tropical deforestation is among the most pressing of environmental tasks. Not only would halting deforestation drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it would save the most ecologically diverse and valuable...