Dear CSF Course graduate, How has economics helped you protect nature? Have you used the tools you learned in your CSF course in your work? Tell us your story, and we will help you share it with the CSF community and the world. The author of the best story will win a brand new Apple iPad! For the full details, click here.

For Conservation Strategy Fund's Brazil Executive Director Marcos Amend was featured on Santa Rosa, California's KRCB, discussing economic development as an alternative to deforestation in the Amazon basin. He also explores the work CSF does to prevent destructive roads from being built through the rainforest. To hear what Marcos has to say, click here.

John Reid discusses California's Proposition 23 and what it would mean for the fate of rain forests in an op-ed featured in Santa Rosa's Press Democrat. "California has always led on environmental policy, but never in the wrong direction." To read the article, click here.

Who is CSF and how do we use economics to protect nature? Mongabay conducted an interview with CSF Founder John Reid to find out. You can click to read the article here.

Conservation Strategy Fund and the Duke Environmental Leadership (DEL) Program are pleased to announce the course Economics of Tiger Conservation in partnership with the World Bank Institute and the Global Tiger Initiative. This one-week course held in North Carolina this November will help environmental professionals working on tiger conservation issues gain knowledge and technical skills for conducting applied economic research in support of endangered species protection.

EcoAmericas recently published an interview with CSF President John Reid, entitled “Making Economics Part of the Conservation Equation,” which can be found on the last page of the pdf below. John was also quoted in the “Eyes on Watershed as Panama Widens Canal” article, which begins on page 6.

The May 8th - 14th, 2010 edition of The Economist published a letter by President John Reid and CSF course graduate and Fellow Wilson Cabral about the Belo Monte dam. The letter pointed out that the shaky economics of the dam will create pressure for even more dam development upstream of Belo Monte. Construction of the Belo Monte on the Xingu River is rapidly moving forward. But there are positive aspects to this story. A delay in the project of several years, partly due to CSF's 2006 study of the dam, has given time for protected areas and a big new carbon project to be consolidated. This will make it harder for additional big dams, which are the real threat, to be built upstream of Belo Monte on the Xingu.

Conservation Strategy Fund has launched a YouTube channel. We will feature videos on CSF projects, courses, staff and student profiles, and informational films. Please subscribe so you can stay up to date with any videos we post. http://www.youtube.com/user/numbers4nature

Watch this short video and hear from our students why they attended our 11th annual International Training in Economic Tools for Conservation at Stanford University in California in August 2009. The students came from all corners of the globe: Indonesia, Cameroon, Haiti, Bhutan, Colombia, Brazil and beyond. Watch the video, below, or by clicking here for our You Tube site.

Read about how CSF got its start and what inspired John to begin teaching others how to use economics to conserve the environment. John Reid: Teaching Ecologists the Economics of Nature