Environmental Markets

Fauna & Flora International’s (FFI) Environmental Markets programme is focused on harnessing the power and resources of commercial markets to protect threatened habitats and provide real and meaningful benefits for the local communities who depend upon them. Understanding the values of ecosystem services is inherently complex and much recent interest has focused on the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity.

There still remain significant challenges in how environmental markets can function on the ground. Our Environmental Markets programme aims to support the theoretical developments with our practical on the ground approach to better understand the benefits and risks for both conservation and communities who depend on natural resources.

Our current focus is on the developing markets for forest carbon through the REDD+ mechanism where FFI has been at the forefront of developing forest carbon markets through projects that will provide sustainable financing for practical and high impact conservation work on the ground.

We have been building expertise and a track record in this area for many years and the expansion of our work on ecosystem services lies at the heart of our strategy for the period 2009-2013. We are developing our work around a range of other ecosystem services such as water and pollination, taking our learnings from our work with carbon to help us better realize the opportunities other environmental markets can provide.

We are also working to build awareness of corporate dependence on ecosystem services and impact on biodiversity and the links to corporate risk. We aim to mainstream ecosystem services and biodiversity into investor strategies through our engagement with business and the finance sector.