Programme de bourses "Jeunes Chercheurs"
Tropical Forestry Projects for Carbon Sequestration and Conservation of Biodiversity
Market Actors’ Preferences and Evaluation of Project Sustainability
Research fellows: Dr. Thomas Köllner and Joachim Sell Zurich, 30.7.2002
Financed by ZIL and KFPE
Executive Summary
Tropical forests provide valuable ecosystem services (ES) like biodiversity, carbon sequestration, water cycling, and scenic beauty. Conservation of forests through sustainable use of such ES is often fostered by governmental institutions (e.g., legislation, taxes and subsidies). However, the idea emerged in the last years that private market mechanisms based on corresponding products (i.e., environmental certificates and shares) for these ES may substantially foster the conservation of tropical forests.
Private investments into forestry based ES and corresponding tradable financial products (e.g., certificates and shares) are innovative and markets just begin to develop. Basic requirements and preferences of market actors and involved stakeholders are, therefore, not well known. In addition, there are deficiencies in integrated assessment of the project management including marketing for tropical forestry-based ES projects.
Our overall goal was, therefore, to investigate tropical forestry projects providing ES and their compliance with preferences of market actors and involved stakeholders. The corresponding objectives are (i) to model biodiversity and the carbon sink potential of tropical forestry projects, (ii) to analyze decision criteria, preferences and expected benefits of market actors from the supply and demand side, (iii) to develop a multi-criteria based method that allows an integrated assessment of projects, and (iv) to propose measures, particularly marketing approaches, that foster market activities and balance the needs of actors of supply and demand side while assuring quality control.
We generated the following results (i) insights into the decision making of an international selection of market actors, which are essential for designing new projects or for investments into projects and (ii) a conceptual framework for the integrated assessment of forest projects in Latin America. The results of the assessment of selected projects allow insights into differences among several types of forestry projects and into trade-offs between economic, social, and environmental dimensions and project management aspects including marketing.
for more information see:
http://www.marketingnature.org (Information on marketing ecosystem services)
http://www.nssi.ethz.ch/res/irl/ecosystemservices (Homepage of Research group "Ecosystem Services")
or contact
Dr. Thomas Koellner (ETH Zurich, Department of Environmental Science, Natural and Social Science Interface (NSSI)) thomas.koellner@env.ethz.ch
