Last month, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and CSF presented the second annual Economic Tools for Conservation in Mexico and the Mesoamerican Reef. Twenty participants from different regions of Mexico and the Mesoamerican Reef came together to learn what economic drivers cause environmental problems and the potential solutions to them. The two-week course was held June 15th-26th at UNAM’s Chamela Biological Station in Jalisco, Mexico.

In October of last year, CSF published a study in collaboration with Niras Fraenkel Ltd. and the Conservation Agreement Fund and with funding from the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, on the environmental and economic impacts of building a port on Jamaica's Goat Islands. The findings were positive: building an equivalent facility at a place called Macarry Bay, to the west of Goat Islands, would cost an estimated $200 million less to build, and will a far smaller environmental cost.

Amazonas native. © Fernanda Preto

CSF International Course graduate Prakash Mani Sharma, Executive Director and Senior Advocate for Pro Public, wrote to us last month with some stunning news. On April 16th, 2015, the Supreme Court of Nepal set a precedent in the area of environment protection by ordering the closure of the mining company, Godawari Marble Industries. This decision is the result of over a decade of litigation by Pro Public to protect the 330 species of butterflies, 254 birds, 80 tree varieties, and 571 types of fruits in Godawari and the Phulchowki hills near the mine.

Photo credit: Fernanda Preto There’s no Wikipedia page so you can be forgiven for suspecting that I’m making it up. But Conservation Economics is actually being practiced by a bunch of serious people engaged in one of the most profound challenges of our time - averting massive losses in the diversity of Earth's life forms. So if it doesn’t exist, it’s time we brought it into being. Here goes:

Workers collecting palm oil fruit In a world of vast natural ecosystems, endlessly diverse life forms and similarly numerous threats to nature, how can people make smart choices about what to try to conserve? It takes biological expertise, to be sure, but economics is also a necessary compass to guide our efforts.

Mountain Gorillas in Virunga National Park, Photo ©2023 Virunga National Park  

Por: Claudia Ochoa, colaboradora La tercera semana de enero visitamos la Amazonía peruana para avanzar con los preparativos del curso Herramientas Económicas para la Conservación en la Amazonía Andina: Manejo de Recursos Naturales y Sostenibilidad Financiera en Áreas Protegidas que se llevará a cabo en la ciudad de Iquitos entre el 9 y 20 de marzo del presente año.

Fern-choked hillside on a lovely stretch of the Camino de Santiago. © John Reid I spent five days in December walking through Spain's Basque Country on the northern variant of the ancient pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. And also walking through the Anthropocene, a geologic era recently declared by non-geologists to describe our time, an epoch in which people shape the earth more than plate tectonics or asteroid collisions.