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Nature’s Returns: Investing in Ecosystem Services

A Special Edition Webinar Series
Center for Business and the Environment at Yale

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 throughout the four focal areas of the series.

This year we will build on the previous year’s webinar series by exploring current experimentation in conservation investments across the US in the following four focal areas: The Role of Private Landowners in Ecosystem Services Markets, Regulatory-Based Conservation Incentives/ Public Engagement, Corporate Strategy and Ecosystem Services, Ecosystem Services and Planning at the Institutional, Local, and Regional Scale. 

Three webinar presentations kick off the series. 

1. Investing in Conservation: Market-Based Approaches: Carrie Sanneman, Willamette Partnership; Todd Gartner, World Resources Institute. November 27th, 2012, 12pm EST

2. The Role of Forests and Forest Owners in National Ecosystem Services Markets: Laurie Wayburn, President, Pacific Forest Trust. December 4th, 2012, 12pm EST 

3. Engaging US Producers in Conservation and Ecosystem Management: Jimmy Daukas, Acting VP of Programs, American Farmland Trust, December 11th, 2012, 12pm EST 

Email invitations for the Nature's Returns webinars will be sent as the dates approach. Visit the 
website CBEY http://cbey.research.yale.edu/ for up-to-date information regarding this and other events. 

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, pleasesubscribe to the Nature’s Returns newsletter for information about upcoming events.