By Carlos Manuel Rodriguez
Last spring I was invited by the Secretariat of the CBD to join a panel tasked with the first-ever assessment of the resources needed to achieve the Aichi Targets — the most ambitious set of global targets to protect nature in history — by 2020. This panel was co-sponsored by the governments of the United Kingdom and India and chaired by CI Board Member Pavan Sukhdev, and comprises eight global experts with a range of scientific, technical, policy and socioeconomic expertise.
In order to provide as robust an assessment as possible of the resources needed to fund conservation activities ranging from pollution reduction to invasive species management, the panel first examined what we know about the economic value of biodiversity.…