New Ecological Economy - Exploring the Path to Making Environmental Protection Profitable

Author: Greta C. Dailly, Catherine Allison
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-12-01
Features: Attendees also heard about some very practical statements, that is, special attention must be given to impoverished people living in environmentally sound regions. A study by the Forest Trends organization found that a large-scale land transfer trend is currently underway globally, transferring land rights to indigenous peoples. As societies become more democratic, the rights of indigenous peoples are also gaining more attention. For example, about 70% of the forests in Mexico are now managed by ejidos (cooperative farms). Ethnic minorities in Indonesia have also made similar demands for forests near their villages. Governments in Canada, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, and the Philippines are increasingly paying attention to the interests of ethnic minorities. The global forest area is gradually shrinking, and local villages are gradually becoming the actual owners of these scarce resources, rather than the nominal owners in the eyes of the government. A more obvious trend is that some international forestry organizations that issue green certificates for timber and timber products have also begun to require that any logging activities must be approved by local or nearby residents before implementation. Sata Scherr, from Maryland, is also a composite forestry official, and her research focuses precisely on the basic needs of impoverished people. Hearing these news, she smiled. The work focus of the Cartonba Group is the protection of the biosphere, but the group has never given enough attention to the millions of people living in these biospheres, which is precisely her point of concern. Most of these hardworking people have not received much education and are destitute. The market cannot move for their benefit, so the financial means discussed at the Cartonba meeting will only make the rich richer and push the poor further out of social development. Scherr has seen many governments label mountain dwellers as illegal settlers, without considering adopting incentive policies to transform these so-called forest destroyers into forest protectors. Before the market can create miracles, the simplest and most practical means is for the government to take the initiative to allocate land to individuals. Of course, even then, Scherr is still unclear about how much reasonable return these projects aimed at protecting ecosystems and improving the living standards of people around them can actually generate. Among the many speakers at the meeting, Scherr liked Patricia Moles' speech the most. She thought Moles' speech was right on target and pointed out a practical path. Moles works for Terra Asset Management, a venture capital company in Brazil dedicated to protecting the biosphere. In her speech, Moles mentioned that her company has funded several key projects focused on developing non-timber tropical products with a fund of $15 million. Although these projects are currently small in scale, their prospects are limitless. For example, one of the joint ventures is currently selling refined babassu oil, which is produced from a native palm tree in Brazil. The product has both industrial value and can be sustainably harvested. Her fund investors include the Inter-American Development Bank and the Swiss government, and they require a return rate of only 20%. Obviously, there are many fields with higher return rates in the world, but these investors still abandoned other fields and turned to her biosphere projects. Moles called these investors' acts "charitable investments."