International Conservation & Development

"We’re documenting over and over again the importance of forests for mitigating floods and providing dry season water,” says Jefferson Hall, a forest ecologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama.

I asked Kelly Sims Gallagher, director of the Center for International Environment & Resource Policy at Tuft University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, what a Republican president — one who opposes action on climate change — could mean for any progress reached in Paris this week.

[from December 2, 2015] Major world leaders today launched an unprecedented global carbon pricing initiative, calling for nations of the world to put a price on carbon pollution to protect the climate and accelerate a transition to ä clean, sustainable energy future. The initiative is sponsored by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund

“Finance is the bedrock of this agreement. It is through commitment of finance that the confidence and the trust that has always been debated in this process is strengthened.” These words of Pa Ousman, Minister of the Environment and Climate Change for the Gambia, reflect a strong sentiment of developing country representatives at the Paris climate negotiations this week: a just climate deal necessitates predictable public flows of money to support the most vulnerable countries in the face of escalating climate disasters, and to enable low-carbon development.

Changing the world is an expensive proposition. But for the representatives for the 195 countries gathered in Paris for the COP21 summit on climate change, the most daunting step might be figuring out how to split the bill. “The elephant in the room is still finance,” said Yvo de Boer, former head of the U.N. climate change body, at the start of the climate talks.

Doreen Stabinsky, Visiting Professor of Climate Change Leadership, Uppsala University, Sweden and Professor of Global Environmental Politics, at College of the Atlantic, Maine, USA, said the price tag for climate damages this century will be in the trillions, with much of that damage in poor and vulnerable countries. “The US is responsible for much of that toll, but they don’t care and they won’t pay. With arm twisting of developing countries, they have language now protecting the richest and heaping devastating costs onto the poorest,” she said.

The air in San Sebastián Tepalcatepec, a farming community in the south-central Mexican state of Puebla, is hot and dry and, frankly, reeks. Alexander Eaton rolls down the window of his pickup truck and inhales. “This smells like opportunity,” he tells Quartz with a grin.

Forty percent of the world’s people share the tropics with 50 percent of the world’s terrestrial life. World population has more than doubled since 1960. Land use decisions will become increasingly controversial as it soars from 7.2 billion to a projected 9.6 billion in 2050. A downloadable publication from the Smithsonian and the BIO Program of the Inter-American Development Bank, “Managing watersheds for ecosystem services in the steepland Neotropics,” offers new tools to weigh trade-offs between water, timber, biodiversity and development.

Of all the issues that will need to be resolved in Paris, experts warn that loss-and-damage may have the greatest potential to derail negotiations before an agreement can be reached. “This is about whether or not they have a place to live and sustain their families into the future,” said Heather Coleman, Oxfam America’s climate policy director. “So this is not a small issue, and it shouldn’t be taken lightly.” Read more