Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

Across the world, scholars, practitioners and advocates for biodiversity conservation are wrestling with how to maintain and enhance biodiversity without adversely affecting local and indigenous peoples. Various approaches have been tried including, most recently, offering incentives for conservation. Generally falling under the rubric of payments for ecosystem services, this approach has yielded various outcomes depending on spatial, social, political and ecological contexts. In this class, we will explore these contexts and outcomes based on a number of case studies.