Mark Tercek is the president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy.

In the recent past, sugarcane growers and conservationists may have seemed unlikely allies.

Today, however, some of Latin America’s leading agricultural businesses — from sugarcane growers to ranchers to soy producers — understand that improving sustainability has a positive impact on their bottom line, local communities and the lands and waters on which all life depends.

This understanding comes at a key moment. As much of the world battles economic and political crises, Latin America is producing good growth, increasing prosperity and political stability. And the outlook for the decade ahead is positive.

While a number of factors will contribute to the region’s continued success, the health of its rich natural resources will be more critical than ever.

Governments and businesses in Latin America face an important decision: exploit those resources for short-term gain, or invest in and sustainably manage them to ensure that nature can keep providing for people in the long-term.

In Colombia, I recently met with sugarcane producers who are choosing the sustainable path. These no-nonsense sugarcane men aren’t your typical tree-hugging environmentalists. But they understand a simple fact: their business relies on steadily-supplied, clean water. And they recognize the important role of nature in producing and filtering water. As a result, these leaders are keenly interested in working with environmental organizations to find ways to produce more with less and ensure the long-term sustainability of their water supply.

And it’s not just agricultural companies that can benefit from integrating nature into their core business strategies. Other industries are similarly discovering that nature can be a smart and cost effective way to protect business assets, mitigate risk and create opportunities.

Latin America offers another powerful example of this idea in practice. Here, bottling company FEMSA has teamed up with The Nature Conservancy, the Inter-American Development Bank and the Global Environment Facility to help restore the natural systems that produce and filter water for 50 million people across Latin America.

The new Latin American Water Funds Partnership will significantly expand a successful model we developed in Quito, Ecuador, in 2000, through which utility companies, breweries and other downstream users voluntarily provide funding for the conservation of forests and watersheds upstream.

This simple concept is a triple win for businesses, communities and nature. Companies save money by preempting the need for more costly water treatment activities. Water resources are kept healthy and flowing for local communities. And natural systems are protected to provide habitat for wildlife and deliver clean water.

Moreover, the funds are self-sustaining. After a relatively small kickoff investment, large water users make voluntary contributions into the fund. Revenue from these investments then provide funding for projects ranging from protecting forests to creating incentives for ecologically sustainable cattle ranching. The concept is so elegant and powerful that it can be replicated throughout Latin America and beyond.

Fortunately, these aren’t just isolated examples. Throughout the region, business leaders are recognizing the importance — and urgency — of ensuring that Latin America’s natural systems remain intact. For example, The Nature Conservancy recently launched the Latin America Conservation Council, co-chaired by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and former Alcoa CEO Alain Belda. The group brings together more than 30 of the region’s top business and political leaders to focus on three areas that represent the most pressing conservation challenges in the region: water security, food security and smart infrastructure development.

As the Latin American economy and population both continue to expand, the private sector has a tremendous opportunity to take the lead in demonstrating that nature conservation isn’t just an aesthetic luxury — it’s an essential investment in a sustainable future.

(Image: Fernando Pallaro is one of the soy farmers working with the Conservancy in Santarém, in the state of Pará, Brazil. Image credit: © Palani Mohan/Cargill Inc.)

Recently, our China program hosted about 30 visitors from Conservancy programs all around the world for a weeklong summit. The goal: to discuss the China program’s conservation strategies. The result: an ambitious new initiative we’re calling Conservation Beyond Borders.

The initiative is a response to a trend that’s dominating headlines: over the last two decades, China has emerged from relative isolation to compete with the U.S. and Europe. That emergence has led to competition in fields as diverse as finance, mining, hydropower and art, but also competition for the world’s attention, focus and resources.

It was this last contested subject that occupied our discussions over a weekend at the base of the Great Wall (and one really spectacular hike along an unrestored section of it). That’s because China’s “Going Out” (the name for the country’s policy to spur investment overseas) has come, fairly or not, with criticism of corporate China’s environmental practices in construction, mining and hydropower.

Some of the visiting international staff members shared their experiences with Chinese firms in Africa, Asia and Central and South America. In Kenya, Chinese construction companies working under contract with the government have been accused of allowing their work crews to poach for food and illegal animal products. In Ecuador, Chinese hydropower companies are constructing dams that could damage a protected area. And in southeast Asia, Chinese furniture companies are said to be purchasing and processing illegal timber.

China staff helped our visitors understand the structure and attitudes of Chinese investment abroad. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that the government started encouraging Chinese companies to invest abroad, and so many firms have little experience in their new contexts.

Inside of China, the government take cares of the permits, environmental assessments and community relationships, while the company is responsible only for completing  its project, be that a building, dam or mine. That leaves businesses unprepared for taking on the increased responsibility necessary to do business in a foreign country. Plus, China has a long-held diplomatic principle of non-interference with regard to the internal affairs of foreign countries, leaving companies with little guidance when it comes to operating under new legal and political systems.

China’s state investment banks (lenders to companies going abroad) have adopted the Equator Principles—a set of guidelines that encourages borrowers to abide by local social and environmental regulations—or some equivalent, but are unclear on how to monitor the effectiveness of those principles. Clearly, Chinese companies looking to new foreign opportunities need better guidance on how to keep their work sustainable.

That’s where Conservation Beyond Borders comes in. The initiative, which began to take shape over the course of the retreat, aims to increase connections between China and the other countries where the Conservancy works.

For example, if a Chinese hydropower company has a contract to design dams on the Magdalena River in Colombia, then freshwater experts from China with experience along the Yangtze can aid the Colombia program in their efforts to keep the Magdalena healthy. Or, the China program could work with African programs to identify best practices for road construction and mineral extraction, then help increase sustainability awareness in the Chinese companies and governments that have contracted to complete these projects.

Even more dramatically, a number of Trustees from the Conservancy’s China Board have pledged to financially support a number of important international projects, further throwing China’s weight behind worldwide conservation. It’s an unprecedented up-welling of philanthropy that “Goes Out” just as China’s businesses have been encouraged to do so. Watch board member Jack Ma announce the China Global Conservation Fund here:

Shawn Zhang, director of the China program, articulated the conclusions of the week: “China is quickly becoming a world power with world responsibilities. Our comparative advantage going forward will be to strategically and responsibly invest to ensure both our future as well as the sustainable health and welfare of our trading partners. TNC is uniquely positioned to play a role by virtue of our strong programs in countries like Colombia, Indonesia and Tanzania, coupled with our reputation in China and our connections to the corporate sector.”

This initiative is just getting started. Stay tuned for more details as we continue to push conservation beyond its traditional borders.

1. Sharks now have a safe haven in the waters of Honduras. (Green)
2. “Super sand” is a new low-cost way to purify contaminated drinking water in developing nations. (BBC) 
3. A highway system for bicyclists? In the U.S.? Sounds like a dream come true! (EcoGeek)
4. Old, used hotel soap is helping save lives, thanks to this ingenious project. (Treehugger)
5. The latest message on climate change? It will affect your garden. (The Daily Green)

The fisheries biologist had finished his presentation and the last slide remained projected on the screen, a beautiful landscape vista of the wild Central American river that would soon be dammed. From the tables in front of the screen a man rose and began speaking in a low voice. Because he spoke slowly—Spanish was not his first or daily language—I could understand most of what he said with my limited vocabulary.

With quiet intensity he told his community’s story, a litany of broken promises and affronts from the government and settlers. He curled his fist into his chest and concluded, “A ellos van siempre los dólares…a nosotros van siempre los dolores.” It was sad and beautiful poetry—“to them always the dollars, to us always the pain”—and, delivered in front of that slide, he looked like an actor before a matte painting of his own river.

This scene unfolded at a workshop intended to produce recommendations for protecting the Patuca River below a proposed hydroelectric dam. The Honduran government had approved this dam, known as Patuca III, and then asked the Conservancy to help them develop environmental flow requirements for the river (the pattern of water levels necessary to maintain the processes and species that comprise a functioning river ecosystem; click here for more information on environmental flows).

The Patuca, currently undammed, is the longest river in Honduras and third longest in Central America. Downstream of the proposed dam site, the river meanders through the largest wilderness in Central America, home to thousands of indigenous people living in dozens of communities along the Patuca.

To determine environmental flows, scientists usually mine existing studies and data, deploy sophisticated tools and models, and synthesize the expert judgment of researchers and managers who are intimately familiar with the river in question. But for the Patuca we could find no published studies, no data sets, and almost no scientific experts who had worked on the river.

With the dam’s initial design and other preparations well underway, we knew we had a small window of time to propose environmental flow recommendations that could be incorporated into the dam’s operating plans. Our challenge compounded by a small budget, we struggled to define a way forward.

We soon realized that the people with the most at stake with any change in river flows—the downstream communities of Tawaka and Miskito people—were also the people who could best answer questions about how the Patuca River really worked.

Collaborating with Honduran government agencies, we organized a boat tour of the Patuca River. The expedition consisted of Honduran scientists and engineers and Dr. Peter Esselman, a fish biologist the Conservancy hired for this project.

Traveling in long dugout canoes, the expedition stopped at 11 communities along the river. At each, Pete and the other scientists interviewed fishermen, farmers, and boat drivers about how they used the river.  They asked questions about which fish they caught and the crops they planted and how river levels—with flows varying dramatically across the year—influenced these activities (to see Pete’s photos from the trip, click here).

The communities also sent representatives to the workshop described above. There, participants repeatedly emphasized the tight linkages between the river and their lives and livelihoods. The Tawaka and Miskito people relied on the river for water, transportation, and fish, while seasonal floods deposited nutrient-rich soil in low-lying farm fields to maintain their long-term productivity.

Combining the information gleaned from these interactions with some simple hydrological analyses we developed recommendations for environmental flows to keep the river healthy. (Pete Esselman and I wrote a journal paper on this project and more information on the process can be found here ).

The fisherman’s speech—expressing his fear that the river would be harmed and his community wronged yet again—outlined in sharp relief for me the human dimensions of this work. Getting the environmental flows right was important for freshwater biodiversity and ecosystems but it was also critically important for these people, people with incredible skills to deal with challenges most of us cannot even contemplate but with almost no ability to influence decisions made in far-off capitals of government and finance.

Globally, people who live along rivers like the Patuca have been the overlooked collateral damage in the process of dam development. Most controversies over dams focus on the people who will be forced to move because they live upstream of the dam and their homes and farms will be flooded by the reservoir. But the Conservancy’s Brian Richter and others recently reported that over 400 million people who lived downstream of dams had potentially been affected by changes to river flows and associated impacts to fisheries, agriculture and water availability.

The Conservancy is focused on restoring rivers below dams to benefit both ecosystems and people and working with governments and dam operators to improve the sustainability of hydropower.

For the Patuca, we were able to shine some light on the importance of the river to the downstream people. However, subsequent events confirmed that there are few neat and tidy outcomes in conservation. First, the Taiwanese funding for the dam was rescinded in May 2009, halting construction before it had even started. But just last Fall, Honduras announced that China would now fund the dam , along with two other dams (Patuca 1 and II) lower on the river. The scale and location of the impacts from these dams will be far different than what we anticipated during the environmental flow process. What comes next—for conservation and for the people of the lower Patuca—is again shrouded in uncertainty.

(Image: The workshop focused on environmental flow recommendations for the Patuca. Image credit: Jeff Opperman)

1. Happy birthday to the EPA–40 years old! What will the next 40 bring? (Green Biz)
2. Cancun needs a conflict resolution expert, thinks Andy Revkin. (DotEarth)
3. Cyclists always knew it was true, but now a new study proves it: in the city, bikes are faster than cars. (Treehugger)
4. Europe decides to keep on trawling. (Green)
5. Wait, this doesn’t sound right: oil exploration threatens the Seaflower Marine Protected Area in Japan? (Mongabay)

Early Saturday morning in Nagoya, Japan, nature got a much needed ‘win.’

Almost a year after the bruising struggle of the Climate Change convention’s COP15, the Convention on Biological Diversity reached all three of its stated goals at its 10th Conference of Parties – an achievement that was uncertain right up to the end.

This negotiation was a quite different in tone from Copenhagen. Nagoya was not marked by any of the high drama and theatrics of Copenhagen, nor did it have heads of state flying in from all around the world. Rather, it was a much more business-like affair of diplomats and environment ministers rolling up their sleeves and working out compromises.

The three major outputs from the COP are:

1. The Nagoya Protocol
   After six years of negotiation, the Convention adopted the Nagoya Protocol on “access and benefit sharing” (ABS) of genetic resources. To make a complicated set of issues as simple as possible, this protocol is intended to define the rules of the game to cover the use of genetic resources taken from one place and transformed and commercialized somewhere else (so, imagine a Swiss pharmaceutical company taking a native plant root from a national park in Brazil and synthesizing a cure for cancer in a laboratory in Basel and then making a trillion dollars). The Protocol sets out the framework by which countries grant access to their genetic resources, regulate and license “bio-prospecting” and export of genetic materials, and revenue-sharing from potential commercialization of products derived from those genetic resources that someone is bothering to conserve. The idea is that clarifying the rules of the game will create additional incentives for countries to conserve nature’s treasure trove of potential cures for whatever ails us.
2. The Strategic Plan
   The conference also adopted a new “Strategic Plan” with a global goal of halting the loss of biodiversity by 2020 to ensure that ecosystems are resilient and able to continue to provide essential benefits and services for people. This represents a significant reframing of the biodiversity agenda around both climate change – noting the role of nature in both climate mitigation and adaptation – and the role of nature in poverty reduction. The 20 headline targets of the plan include:
   • Reduce the rate of all natural habitat loss by half by 2020.
   • All commercial fish stocks, forests and agricultural lands should be sustainably managed by 2020.
   • Prevent the extinction of known species by 2020.
   • By 2020, 17% of all terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems (we are currently at 12%) and 10% of all marine and coastal ecosystems (we are currently at only 1%) should be effectively managed in legally designated protected areas.
3. The Resource Mobilization Strategy
   Another reason for guarded optimism this time around is that the Biodiversity Convention also adopted a “resource mobilization strategy,” recognizing that we can’t achieve the goal and supporting targets without a substantial increase in funding for conservation. The Convention was also clever enough to look at financing from “all sources” recognizing the need for both public and private resources for conservation, as well as both domestic and foreign aid funding in developing countries. Earlier this year, the donor countries replenished the Global Environment Facility, the multilateral trust fund established to finance the climate and biodiversity conventions, to the tune of $4.25 Billion for the period 2010-2014, a 37% increase over the previous four-year period. And at the Conference, France announced an additional 4 Billion euros for conservation over the next decade.  We’ll come back in two years and have another round of talks on more specific funding targets once countries have assessed how much it will cost to achieve the targets (and hopefully when the world economy is a little healthier.)

Emergent Themes

Aside from the official negotiations, a couple of key themes emerged that will likely shape the discourse on conservation over the next few years. First, there was an undercurrent of recognition of the increasingly interrelated nature of biodiversity conservation, climate change and development. Second, there was a lot more focus on the economics of biodiversity. The headline for this was the launch of the TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity), which basically summarized the state of the art on the valuation of ecosystem services, and scolded mainstream economics for ignoring the economic benefits of nature as well as ignoring the costs of ecosystem degradation and pollution.

Nature Conservancy Initiatives

Finally, let me highlight a bit of the Conservancy business that got done on the margins of the Conference.  Obviously, these conferences are important for the formal negotiations, but they are also the biggest trade fair of the year on biodiversity, attracting donors and partners and researchers and the media – which is where the real excitement is.

• Forever Costa Rica – We and our partners announced again the completion of the Forever Costa Rica project, whereby we collectively raised some $57 million to help Costa Rica complete its protected areas commitments under the Biodiversity Convention. The project was highlighted at a high level dinner celebrating the LifeWeb Initiative, which mobilized over $120 Million for conservation - Forever Costa Rica accounted for almost half of that.
• Tri-National Initiative – The Conservancy has been promoting a three-country protected areas initiative in Latin America, involving the governments of Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. Our savvy policy team there managed to get ministers from all three countries on the stage at an event to profile the developing project, with the right donor partners in the audience to witness the political commitment coming from the countries.
• Caribbean Challenge – We also had the occasion to highlight our Caribbean Challenge project as an innovative conservation finance scheme. The project aims to establish a $40 million trust fund to provide permanent funding for conservation in eight Caribbean countries, as well as matching contributions from each of the eight countries.
• West Indian Ocean Partnership – We also secured the commitment from the government of the Seychelles to work with a half dozen or more countries of the Indian Ocean and East African coast to develop a series of conservation commitments over the next year or so, modeled on the Micronesia and Carribean Challenges.
• We also launched two important reports on the status of the world’s Marine Protected Areas and on the state of financing of the protected areas networks of Latin America. The recommendations of the former directly influenced the marine outcomes of the negotiations, while the latter directly contributed to the finance outcome, providing a model for the national cost analyses that countries should undertake over the next two years.

Finally, I am more optimistic today than I was when the international community adopted a vague target in 2002 to halt the loss of biodiversity by 2010. This time around, we have a much clearer description of what success looks like, and what the path and guideposts are to get there. That’s significant, even if we are not 100% successful by 2020.

Lastly, let me just conclude by saying that we had a stellar (if now exhausted) and highly diverse Conservancy delegation in Nagoya, working the corridors, presiding at side events, and supporting the country delegations. Over the course of the two weeks, we had something like 12 nationalities represented, speaking over 10 languages, with a team that was never much bigger than 15 people. The Nature Conservancy truly looks and acts like an international organization on the world stage.

(Image: Cheetah in the Serengeti, Tanzania, Africa. Image credit: © Kenneth K. Coe)

1. Here it is:  the long-awaited Senate climate/energy bill!  (Huffington Post Green)
2. The Nature Conservancy (hey, that’s us!) just announced its purchase of California’s Independence Lake, a popular hiking and angling destination as well as an important water source.  (AP/Bloomberg BusinessWeek)
3. We’re already pretty familiar with the damage an oil spill can do to the environment, but what about the effects on human health?  (The Daily Green)
4. The key to jaguars’ survival?  Let them roam.  (New York Times)
5. The “next oil”:  wind, solar, waves, trash…or something we haven’t even thought of yet?  (Yahoo Green)

My husband returns to the same reefs every year in the Bahamas, where he has been teaching a coral reef ecology class for the last 14 years. On his 2008 trip, he noticed that the reef fish were missing. The culprits were quickly identified — and during his 2009 course, he and his students were eating them.

Lionfish.

Lionfish do not belong in the Caribbean. They are native to the South Pacific and Indian Ocean and made their way into the Caribbean through the release (the exact event is unknown) of aquarium fish. Some say they were in a tank that was destroyed in Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Others say it was a release of just 3 or 6 specimens. Whatever the case, lionfish are now spotted as far north as Rhode Island, and are popping up all over the Caribbean, from Colombia to the Virgin Islands to the Bahamas.

The Bahamas‘ marine ecosystem has already been hard hit. The people that know these reefs well are witnessing a rapid decline in reef fish thanks to these voracious predators, which have an appetite for juvenile reef fish. Their method of attack is particularly unique. Instead of an ambush attack or high-speed chase, lionfish make their presence known and confuse their prey by displaying their beautiful fins like a peacock, slowly dancing towards their prey and then rapidly sucking the prey into their mouths like a vacuum. This technique is so effective because no other predator in the Caribbean uses it — so prey are not adapted to avoid it.

Lionfish have no natural predators in Caribbean waters and are thriving on the tasty but already dwindling choice of baby reef fish. Some think that native grouper might have preyed on lionfish — but because grouper are overfished in the Caribbean (and in most parts of the world), the options beyond human predators are few.

As the distribution of lionfish in the Caribbean expands and the severity of this invasion is becoming more apparent, managers are trying to figure out what to do before the adult populations of reef fish are seriously affected. In the Bahamas, they have issued a “kill on sight” directive. The Caribbean Fisheries Management Council has even developed a Most Wanted Poster to encourage removal of these fish.

The best way to get rid of them? Put them on the menu! In Asia, lionfish are a popular menu item. That’s not yet the case in the Caribbean, so folks are working to change the culture of fear that surrounds lionfish (they have toxic spines that really hurt when they touch you) into a culture of desire for a delightful bite of this light and tasty fish. There are even websites that are collecting lionfish recipes — everything from sushi to Bahamian style fritters to smoked lionfish dip (yum!).

The hope is that people will be motivated to hunt and remove these fish, taking advantage of the existing tradition of artisanal fishing in the Caribbean and turning fishers toward this undesirable species and perhaps away from dwindling populations of grouper and snapper.

An additional approach to this problem — and one that would benefit the reef in DEHE multiple ways as well — would be to beef up protection of large predators such as grouper and sharks so that they can work to keep this ecosystem in balance and potentially keep the lionfish population in check.

My husband’s students decided to do a small research project to examine the gut contents (i.e., what is in the bellies) of lionfish they found on the Bahamian reefs, and discovered that their bellies were quite full of baby reef fish. The reward for their efforts was a yummy dinner of fried lionfish…and my husband assures me that in terms of flavor and texture, they compete with any flakey white fish you can think of or catch in the Caribbean. So…

This is probably the only time you’ll hear me advocating for people to eat fish. If you want to eat fish, I’d usually refer you to Monterrey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch — a guide that helps diners make decisions about the most sustainable and healthy options for seafood. However, when it comes to lionfish in the Caribbean, I say chow down to your heart’s content!

A few weeks ago, word got out that a review being published in September’s American Journal of Clinical Nutrition had concluded that organic foods are not healthier or more nutritious than conventional food.

Organic advocates were outraged. Mildly engaged consumers began to wonder if organics were really worth the higher price tag.

Momentarily leaving aside some the review’s conclusions, my first thought was: Is higher nutritional quality really what motivates consumers to buy organic food, anyway? Isn’t it more about what’s not in the food than what is?

Most people I know who make a point of buying organic do so to avoid ingesting antibiotics, pesticides and other toxins. Sure, if my organic tomato had a few more vitamins than a conventionally grown one, that would be a nice bonus, but it’s not the reason I’m buying it.

And according to the Organic Trade Association, there are plenty of other good reasons to buy organic food that don’t have anything to do with what goes in your body. The association provides information on how organic agriculture can improve soil fertility, prevent chemical fertilizers from polluting waterways and accommodate higher species diversity.

Make your own connection between food and conservation this Earth Day and throw a Picnic for the Planet. Join all the others who are putting their dot on the map and taking the Earth to lunch.

The environmental reach of conventionally grown food is longer than most of us can even imagine. I stopped buying non-organic bananas after a short visit to Costa Rica revealed something about the industry I never would have known about: the use of plastic bags.

During my visit, my colleague and I drove past millions of banana trees, but I never saw a single banana. Instead, I saw big, blue plastic bags covering each banana bunch on every single tree.

My colleague explained that these bags were filled with pesticides and placed over the bananas to protect them from insects that might cause brown spots on the fruit, making them aesthetically unappealing to American consumers.

According to FleetWatch, these bags are used three times before being recycled, but locals will tell you that these blue bags are everywhere, littering the forest floor and choking rivers and streams.

But back to the review.

The review of 55 studies from 1958 to 2008 found that conventionally produced crops had a higher content of nitrogen, while organically produced crops had higher phosphorous and acidity content. No differences were found between the two classes of crops for the other nutrient categories — including vitamin C, zinc, and calcium — that were analyzed.

The review, funded by the U.K. Food Standards Agency, didn’t look for differences in pesticide residues between organic and conventional growing methods.

Organic advocates had strong objections to the review for a number of reasons.

Michael Hansen, Ph.D., a senior scientist at Consumers Union, cited the use of older studies as a major flaw. He told WebMD that most studies done before 1980 probably had flawed methodologies, and newer studies show clear differences in nutrient content between the two growing methods.

Secondly, the study doesn’t look at differences in polyphenols and certain antioxidants, which chief scientist for The Organic Center Charles Benbrook, Ph.D., says are 25 percent higher in organically grown food.

So, what does this mean for your food purchases?

Benbrook actually has some really sound advice: If you want to maximize the nutrient content of your produce, choose the freshest and most colorful fruits and vegetables. And if you want to minimize pesticide residues and environmental pollution, choose organic.

For now, my habits — choosing organic and local produce when I can — aren’t changing.

(Image: Banana bags in Costa Rica. Credit: Margaret Southern/TNC.)

Forest Carbon Policy Advisor Rane Cortez tells us about getting the world ready to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation through workshops and online trainings, and how these trainings relate to the climate negotiations underway now in Bonn:

Here at the UN climate negotiations in Bonn, there is a lot of talk about “getting ready for REDD.” REDD is shorthand for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

For the past year, I have been living in a world of REDD, providing training around the globe — in Indonesia, Peru, Guatemala and the Democratic Republic of Congo — to instill a basic level of knowledge among key stakeholders on the technical, political and implementation aspects of REDD.

In partnership with the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Alliance, Conservation International, GTZ, Rainforest Alliance and WWF, The Nature Conservancy led the development and delivery of this 3-day training course titled An Introduction to Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation. Over the weekend in Bonn we announced an online version of this training that will be live next week.

In each country’s training, national and government officials, local NGO members and indigenous people participated together to gain a fuller understanding of what REDD is.

It’s been very interesting to see the similar concerns and issues that countries are grappling with as they think about REDD, including:

• technical issues like creating reference levels or baselines for carbon emissions;
• social issues of how to ensure stakeholders are involved and their rights are recognized in the process;
• governance issues that improve the legal, financial and institutional structures for forest management.

One of the most valuable outcomes of the workshops is the strengthening of relationships between these diverse actors. For example, no matter where we are, representatives of indigenous peoples always speak up to the national governments, asking to be more involved. These trainings begin to create relationships and help level the playing field so all stakeholders have a similar understanding of what REDD is.

The training also gives countries some ideas about what they can start on now, even though the international policy on REDD hasn’t been figured out yet. By building networks of people who are working on REDD, we keep everyone from having to reinvent the wheel.

And it’s nice to know that our efforts will help strengthen forest institutions and stakeholder relationship no matter what REDD shapes up to be. (You can read more about the Conservancy’s thoughts on how REDD should work here.)

The Nature Conservancy knows first-hand from our involvement in places like Bolivia with the Noel Kempff Mercado Climate Action Project and in the Berau district of Indonesia that significant capacity building is needed to make REDD work. Much work has already begun in many countries, but much more is still needed. We hope that making our training course available online will help fill that need.

Download the Participant Manual and Instructors Manual, as well as corresponding presentations.

The self-guided, interactive online course — free and available to all — is a fun and interesting way for anyone to learn the basics of REDD. It features interactive content with quizzes, assessments, and activities and provides a comprehensive overview of REDD, including topics like: the role of forests in climate change, drivers of deforestation, technical and political elements, social considerations, and project development. Available soon at: www.conservationtraining.org.

(Image: Measuring trees in Bolivia as part of a sustainable forestry project. Source: Ami Vitale.)