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The carbon market has been big news over the last few years, while the equally important issue of conserving biodiversity through similar methods has languished in obscurity.
At the same time, cash-strapped governments around the world have been experimenting with innovative financing mechanisms for conserving nature that tap private development to preserve valuable habitat as economies grow. For such programs to work, however, they must be transparent and well-understood.
While SpeciesBanking.com was initially focused on the North American conservation banking sector, it is now expanding its coverage to include biodiversity compensation mechanisms around the world, following last year’s publication of State of Biodiversity Markets: Offset and Compensation Programs Worldwide, which documented $2 billion in performance-based financing for habitat preservation. With this expanded scope, speciesbanking.com will serve as a clearinghouse of biodiversity compensation information covering everything from fish habitat banks in Canada to policy developments on biodiversity offsets in Mongolia and everyplace in between.
The global annual market for biodiversity offsets, compensation and bank credits is officially estimated at around $2 billion but is likely much bigger since this nascent biodiversity market has largely developed under the radar.
Last year saw significant forays in the realm of biodiversity conversation when the ‘International Year of Biodiversity’ and the 10th Conference of Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP10) catalyzed many governments to consider policies and programs that might drive markets for biodiversity protection. “The concepts of offsetting have become quite sophisticated, but there is a limited awareness among policymakers and the general public about what it means to do species-banking,” says Joshua Bishop, the Chief Economist at International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). “A global version of SpeciesBanking.com could help demystify this whole thing and remove some of the red flags.”
With governments promising to halve biodiversity loss by 2020 while watching coffers slide into crisis mode, these policies and programs provide examples of new mechanisms to incentivize investments in biodiversity restoration and protection. “People are looking for solutions to this question of balancing development and conservation,” says Ray Victurine of Wildlife Conservation Society. “There is not enough money in the public coffers to carry out the conservation needed so people are looking for different models.”
SpeciesBanking.com will be debuted in an online live webinar launch later this month, details to be confirmed shortly. Details will be posted on speciesbanking.com.
About Ecosystem Marketplace
Ecosystem Marketplace is an initiative of Forest Trends and is dedicated to providing information on markets and payment schemes for ecosystem services. The Ecosystem Marketplace believes that by providing reliable information on costs, regulation, science, and other market-relevant factors, markets for ecosystem services will one day become a fundamental part of our economic system, helping give value to environmental services that, for too long, have been taken for granted. Ecosystem Marketplace is a project of Forest Trends, a non-profit organization that works to create and capture market values for ecosystem services.
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