Upland watersheds in the tropics provide a range of crucial ecosystem goods and services. How they are governed can be crucial to human well-being and environmental sustainability. Communities, governments and firms have taken many different approaches to sharing these benefits, negotiating trade-offs between them, and allocating the risks and burdens if services are degraded or lost.

Forests provide wide range of ecosystem services and thereby help communities to derive many direct and indirect benefits. Forest watershed services of absorbing rain water and releasing it slowly, allowing it to seep into the soil preventing run-off with sediments helps communities downstream to maximise the benefits from crop cultivation.

This book illustrates the application of bio-cultural community protocols to a range of environmental legal frameworks. Part I focuses on the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and access and benefit-sharing.

The stability of the Amazon forest

As Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (BES) decline, this is increasingly translating to business risk and opportunity linked to reputational risk, security of supply and legal compliance.

A tool for investors to assess the management of biodiversity and ecosystem services risks and opportunities in companies with an agricultural supply chain. This document describes the Ecosystem Services Benchmark (ESB), drawing examples from its

Two formidable challenges seem to overarch agriculture and food production in this century: how to end hunger and how to keep global warming at a level that will allow humanity and the agroecosystems we depend upon to adapt in a noncatastrophic way.

Benefits to people from water ecosystems like rivers, swamps,
floodplains and groundwater systems are central to human
well-being. But ecosystems are in trouble and the Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment, the Comprehensive Assessment of
Water Management in Agriculture, and the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change have each shown that freshwater

The purpose of the publication is to provide biodiversity-relevant information to the UNFCCC. Main messages focus on: the impacts of climate change on biodiversity; the role of biodiversity in climate change adaptation; the links between biodiversity conservation and sustainable use and climate change mitigation; and ways and means to value biodiversity with regard to climate change responses.

This report calls for Asia's first regional climate change adaptation agreement in the Greater Mekong region, which, as one of the regions with richest biological diversity on the earth, is already strongly affected by climate change. It urges politicians to strike an ambitious and fair agreement on a climate treaty at upcoming talks in Copenhagen.

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