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Innovative Financial Tools for Conservation - How The Nature Conservancy Utilizes Conservation Finance Notes and Other Mechanisms

The 2013-2014 edition of 'Nature's Returns: Investing in Ecosystem Services' has arrived! The Yale Center for Business and the Environment (CBEY) is pleased to continue this exciting webinar series that addresses the growing importance of ecosystem service valuation and investment. This year CBEY is joined by co-sponsor Island Press and the Conservation Finance Network in presenting a new round of webinar mini-series. Building on the previous years' webinar series, this season we will explore current experimentation in ecosystem services across the US in the following focal areas: Investments in Green Infrastructure, Innovative Financial Tools, and Community Economic Development.

Nature's Returns: Investing in Ecosystem Services

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’s Returns: 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.

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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 theNature’s Returns newsletter for information about upcoming events.