CSF is helping Yap State in the Federated States of Micronesia design a framework for sustainable economic development. Key stakeholders will explore scenarios for future development, learn how to measure environmental, social, cultural and economic impacts of different types of programs, and evaluate the potential of proposed projects to achieve sustainable development. This effort is one of several analysis projects being conducted in Micronesia following CSF's Economic Tools for Conservation in Micronesia course held in March of 2012.

Cattle ranching is a leading cause of deforestation in the Amazon Basin. Forests are razed for pasture when landowners perceive that more profits can be made from cows than from the various products of the intact forest. This calculation is influenced by the availability of subsidized credit, long used a tool to drive economic expansion on the agricultural frontier.

Solving our global climate crisis hinges on doing a number of things right. One is slowing - eventually stopping - deforestation, which now accounts for 15-20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. To do that we need to know how much stopping deforestation costs and where on the Earth's vast tropical belt it can be done most cost-effectively. With the support of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, CSF has designed an "opportunity cost" analysis method that works at the level of individual farms and single land uses, even scalable up to the level of entire regions.