In September 2009, Theresa Kas visited the small village of Sohoneliu in the Manus Province of her native Papua New Guinea. It was a dramatic change of scenery from Stanford, where, a month earlier, she had completed Conservation Strategy Fund’s international “Economic Tools for Conservation” course. Kas, who works with The Nature Conservancy, saw that deforestation was on the rise and traditional hunting was dwindling, and wondered if the local economy’s resource base was careening toward collapse. So she pulled out her CSF notes and put them to use.

Last month, we had the opportunity to bring CSF’s economic analysis training to a new audience – the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington D.C.  The IDB approves over $11 billion dollars in loans each year, and is a major force in shaping the face of development in Latin America.  We delivered two training workshops for transport and water sector specialists from various country offices, and a shorter session for IDB Economists based in D.C.

In November, the Margaret A. Cargill Foundation's Environment Program awarded CSF $100,000 as part of our expanding marine initiative. This award will fund a decision-makers workshop and a mentored groundwork field analysis.

On November 12th, in Brasília, Brazil, 30 journalists from the Amazonian regional media as well as from the national and international outlets attended an infrastructure-focused workshop organized by CSF-Brasil. These professionals hailed from various organizations including O Eco, IPAM, IMAZON, WWF, and TNC. John Lyons of the Wall Street Journal, Wilson Cabral of Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica, and Paul E. Little, anthropologist and infrastructure expert, were also in attendance. Speakers shared information about the impacts of infrastructure projects on ecosystem services in the Amazon. The event provided a forum to discuss infrastructure project planning as well as key environmental, social, economic and legal issues that need to be understood by society.

The Arbol de Piedra, or “Stone Tree,” is a lone 20-foot rock that has been sculpted by wind and sand to look like a resilient yet stunted tree. It’s a good metaphor for the tough life on the Andean high plains, and the icon of Bolivia’s Eduardo Abaroa National Wildlife Reserve.

http://conservation-strategy.org?1384467323 Tanzania’s national parks teem with the big storybook animals: rhinoceroses, lions, elephants and hippopotami.  Only a few parks however, have historically teemed with visitors.

This past June I spent three weeks in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) facilitating one of CSF’s flagship Economics Tools for Conservation courses. The course focused on infrastructure planning and biodiversity conservation in the Albertine Rift. The course was delivered in partnership with L'École Régionale post-universitaire d'Aménagement et de gestion Intégrés des Forêts et territoires Tropicaux (ERAIFT). Holding the course in DRC was a great opportunity to share economic tools with conservationists and infrastructure planners that work in an area which faces new and rapid development options.

CSF economists Susan Seehusen, Aaron Bruner and John Reid joined the German technical support agency, GiZ, and the Mexican Protected Areas Commission, CONANP, to support two big efforts to leverage the economic value of protected areas. Over weekend of October 18-19, Aaron and Susan joined GiZ and parks officials from a handful of Latin American countries to provide technical guidance for the newly launched ValuES program. Yes, that's an upper-case ES for Ecosystem Services; the program focuses on highlighting the values protected ecosystems deliver to human communities in focus countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Vietnam and India, among others.

CSF is opening a program of “office hours” with experts who will help you figure out what to analyze and how. These consultations are free and an exclusive service for graduates of CSF courses.. Here’s how it works: Click on the link below and provide some basic information about the issue, problem, policy or activity you want to analyze. We’ll gather the ideas and set up a meeting for you with a member of our staff or one of our consulting experts via videoconference or telephone. Examples of analyses we will help you design could include • cost-benefit analysis of a sustainable development project, • revenue strategy for a protected area, • formulation of arguments to confront a specific environmental threat, • economic valuation of an ecosystem or protected area,

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation awarded a grant of $256,000 this month to support CSF's Conservation Economics Initiative. The CEI is a CSF-Duke University effort to spread the effective use of conservation economics to benefit natural ecosystems. Moore's support, along with funds from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, will be used to set up local hubs where CSF-style conservation economics courses can be delivered by our own course graduates. The CEI will also take CSF's deep in-person training know-how and transform it into online teaching resources to make sure that more conservationists learn the economic essentials and that our students have knowledge at their fingertips when they need it.