Mangroves on the Equador coastline. © Ammit Jack Since 2008, Ecuador’s Socio Bosque Program has been protecting the country’s environment through incentive payments to individual and community land owners. Socio Bosque has to date protected nearly 1.3 million hectares of important habitat. In 2013, the government decided to expand the program to mangroves, one of the most productive and threatened ecosystems in the world.

Transport specialists and workshop participants, Asuncion, Paraguay Ecosystems in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) sustain hundreds of millions of people, but are threatened by a series of interlocking challenges. Rapid development and population growth have placed increasing pressure on natural resources. Pollution, deforestation, infrastructure, large-scale tourism development, invasive species, and over-fishing all threaten these highly bio-diverse ecosystems, as do the effects of climate change.

On January 15th 2014, together with 6 other passengers and 3 crewmembers, I embarked on the polar sailing yacht Kotik to the Antarctic Peninsula. It all started in the beginning of 2012, when an old friend of mine, historian and photographer João Paulo Barbosa, invited me to go to Antarctica to try and summit Mount Rio Branco. A 976 meter-high mountain that rises west of Cape Perez at the entrance of Beascochea Bay, it is thought of as one of the most beautiful, fascinating and unexplored regions of the Antarctic Peninsula.

In May Conservation Strategy Fund and World Wide Fund for Nature - Nepal (WWF Nepal) held a one-day policy forum on biodiversity conservation and infrastructure development. The forum covered environmental economics and policy tools used to integrate conservation and infrastructure plans in Nepal. The discussion focused on how infrastructure planning and decision-making could be improved across the Himalayan Region. Dr. Krishna Chandra Paudel, Secretary of Nepal’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment, specifically addressed the need to comprehensively evaluate infrastructure projects and policies at the national level.

As part of CSF's Conservation Economics Initiative, we are developing an innovative online Coastal Conservation Economics course in partnership with Duke University. The 4-month distance-learning course will be launched in January 2015, and will include interactive lectures, video lessons, webinars, virtual office hours, readings, exercises and exams, with an expected time commitment of about 3 hours per week.

Want to know why environmental problems happen? How to value things in the natural environment? The essentials of fisheries and forestry economics? Step-by-step instructions on cost-benefit analysis? As part of the Conservation Economics Initiative, we just released an exciting new collection of video lessons intended for anyone interested in learning basic environmental economic concepts, refreshing what was learned in our courses, or to complement lectures.

Fecha límite: 06 Junio 2014 La Unidad de Apoyo de ICAA seleccionará entre cuatro y seis propuestas de investigación aplicada con el objetivo de incrementar el conocimiento y comprensión de aspectos clave sobre biodiversidad, aspectos socio-económicos de conservación, e inversiones en infraestructura en la Amazonía Andina. Para ver y descargar la convocatoria completa haga click aquí

As part of our expanding Conservation Economics Initiative, CSF held our first webinar last month in collaboration with the Marine Ecosystem Services Partnership (MESP) at Duke University. Brian Murray, Director for Economic Analysis from the Duke Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, discussed carbon sequestration benefits in terrestrial and marine ecosystems.

CSF is launching its Training Partner Network as part of our Conservation Economics Initiative to bring economics training to more conservation professionals around the world.  This effort is made possible thanks to a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. One of the cornerstones of the Initiative is a network of CSF Training Partner organizations offering conservation economics training in parts of the world where we do not have our own training teams.  The Network will be supported by CSF and by our academic partners throughout the globe.

CSF was recently awarded $100,000 to expand our trainings, analyses, collaborative field work in Africa, thanks to the generosity of the Handsel Foundation.