Skip to main content

Entrepreneurship and Innovation in International Forest Finance - The Green Broker Network

We are delighted to present the finalists and winner of the Innovation Prize presented at the 2014 International Society of Tropical Foresters conference “Forest as Capital: Top-down and bottom-up finance approaches to conserve tropical forests.”

The ISTF Forest Finance Innovation Prize aims to bring attention to practical and strategic finance initiatives designed to conserve tropical forest ecosystems and that answer:

  • What tools can transform traditional donor-backed conservation to financially sustainable conservation and livelihoods?
  • What are practical methods that can be incorporated into private investment in the tropics (agricultural commodities, mining, timber extraction, etc.) that can ensure permanent conservation value?
  • How can sustainably-sourced forest products find markets in their country of origin and not be dependent on export?

Email invitations for the Nature's Returns webinars will be sent as the dates approach. Visit the CBEY website for up-to-date information regarding these and other events.

Nature's Returns: Entrepreneurship and Innovation in  International Forest Finance
 
A Special Edition Webinar Series
 
Yale Center for Business and the Environment 
 

The Yale Center for Business and the Environment (CBEY) is pleased to announce the third year of Nature’sReturns: Investing in Ecosystem Services, a webinar series that addresses the growing importance of ecosystem service valuation and investment. The benefits that human populations gain from healthy and functioning ecosystems are vast. Clean drinking water filtered by forests, carbon stored in plants or soil, crop pollination by wild insects, and pharmaceutical uses of plants are just a few examples of services humans usually receive for free. A recent wave of efforts to monetize the value of Ecosystem Services presents an opportunity to both protect these assets and bring their worth onto the market. Public and private mechanisms exist to use payments to encourage responsible land management in order to preserve public benefits. Currently, conservationists and investors alike are moving into this space in hopes of achieving a win-win for the economy and the environment.

So, what do Ecosystem Services projects look like? Who are the practitioners involved and what skills are most important in terms of getting into the profession? What obstacles and opportunities does this field face? These questions and more (including those from the audience) will be addressed throughout the four focal areas of the series.

 

The Ecosystem Services webinars are supported by the Yale Center for Business & the Environment. They will be free and open to the public through online webcasts. Each presentation will be recorded and made available to the global community through Yale University's iTunesU channel. More details about the speakers associated with each focal area will follow. If interested, please subscribe to the Nature’s Returns newsletter for information about upcoming events.