The Role of Forests and Forest Owners in National Ecosystem Services Markets

Featured speaker Laurie Wayburn will discuss how her organization, The Pacific Forest Trust, is currently exploring ecosystem services markets and payments as a tool to promote forest conservation in the West. She will review how private forest landowners are currently engaging in these markets, and project current and future challenges to attracting more investments in American forests.

The Yale Center for Business and the Environment (CBEY) is pleased to announce the second 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.