Watershed Connect

For two years now, flower growers along the shore of Kenya’s Lake Naivasha have been paying farmers in the hills 40 kilometers away to adopt sustainable agriculture practices. They’re doing it to save their lake, but it’s also helping farmers lift themselves out of poverty.

Images of oil-drenched Mayflower, Arkansas have been front-page news all week, but the real environmental damage – and economic cost – is being incurred 1500 miles to the north, where the impact of tar sands operations on water supplies is only now coming into focus. It's time to identify the true cost of tar sands extraction.

Everyone agrees we won’t solve the global water crisis without more involvement from the private sector, but how do we bring them in? One answer, increasingly, is to promote better governance. For only if the public sector functions can the private sector perform.

Ecosystem Marketplace will be hosting a webinar this month on the best and most up to date financing mechanisms for watershed conservation. Not long after, in May, the Katoomba Group will hold their 18th meeting in Beijing, China to investigate nature-based solutions to the water crisis.

Entering into a PWS program is more akin to getting married than it is to buying a normal product, and participants often face an array of hopes and fears at the outset. Here’s how deep-pocketed flower-growers along the shore of Kenya’s Lake Naivasha and subsistence farmers in the hills 40 kilometers away finally tied the knot – and what it means for similar programs.

To build ecosystem markets, we’ve tended to break holistic nature into incomplete but measurable chunks of nature – and then we wonder why it’s difficult to bundle those chunks into something holistic. Maybe instead of stacking existing credits, we should be creating more holistic instruments.

Subsistence farmers in the hills above Kenya’s Lake Naivasha face an uncertain future, and climate-change has only made it worse. Here’s how WWF and CARE teamed up to harvest payments for watershed services that might help those farmers through the coming bad years – and, in the process, save the lake below.

Flower growers in Kenya’s Rift Valley have gradually reduced their runoff to keep their water clean, but subsistence farmers high in the hills can’t afford to implement such actions. WWF is spearheading a PWS program designed to fix that, by asking downstream users to support sustainable agriculture efforts in the catchments.

The Supreme Court recently listened to a case arguing the government is not allowed to require a landowner to use personal resources for public use in order to obtain a permit. Here, The Swamp School, an educational group for those interested in wetlands and green issues, has provided key elements of the case that all seem to center around the scope of government.

Nearly all types of environmental finance – whether mitigation banking, payments for watershed services, or REDD – involve some form of remote sensing. But this catch-all phrase encompasses scores of practices using radar, lidar, and infrared technology from satellites, airplanes, and blimps. Here's how they all fit together.