Why Environmentalism Needs High Finance

Over at SeedMagazine.com, there's a great discussion of the need to align economic incentives and biological imperatives.

Problems could be averted if species had a value that was neither zero nor infinity, and if there were incentives for people to engage in environmental stewardship before a species becomes endangered.
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We can also use market mechanisms to transfer the actual value of environmental assets to stakeholders in a local community. In low-income countries, efforts to protect the environment often ignore the needs of local people, and efforts to alleviate poverty can produce incentives to degrade the environment. Pristine land is often a low-income community’s most valuable asset, yet they tend to lack access to the conservation value of those resources. Responsibly capitalizing those resources while explicitly linking the capitalization to environmental stewardship could embed a sustained conservation incentive within communities. Some groups have focused on spending —  so-called biodiversity payments — to protect the environment in such situations. We believe that a focus on lending is the best approach.

One of the authors, Josh Donlan, was a Kinship Conservation Fellow with our national director, Liza Gonzalez. For more on his innovative conservation policies, check out this profile of him at ExperienceLife.com. Josh is helping us with our turtle program, and we're glad his work is getting some recognition.