Hall on making most of 'wild wealth'
Under the wide green umbrella of the Panamanian rainforest, the only signs of human intrusion are yellow, orange and blue marks painted around some of the tree trunks. Those marks help measure the plants’ water efficiency, as trees are believed to steady the flow of rivers.
“We are trying to understand the services provided by forests,” says Jefferson Hall, a Yale-educated forest ecologist with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.
For the past five years Hall has been working on the Panama Canal watershed, on forest regeneration and measuring the effects of different land uses on water flows, as well as carbon sequestration and biodiversity. At the same time he is assessing the potential economic return from investment in environmental protection.
His research, in one of the most bio-diverse countries in a region at the forefront of carbon negotiations, is part of a growing effort to give the environment a realistic financial value.
According to recent findings by the Inter-American Development Bank or IDB, Latin America and the Caribbean are home to half of the earth’s tropical forests. The region hosts 40 per cent of global biodiversity, which in turn supports 15 per cent of its GDP and 50 per cent of its exports.
In a novel initiative, the IDB believes this “wild wealth” could be turned into a spur for growth and innovation by including the value of biodiversity in key economic sectors.