The American Power Act of 2010 is out of the shadows, and some provisions make it possible to earn carbon credits for reducing greenhouse gasses by capturing carbon in trees. But that often involves paying for something today that won’t be delivered for decades. How can the insurance industry engage the forest carbon offset asset market so as to deliver an offset asset that is real, measurable and verifiable  as well as secured, insured and preferred?

The UN has declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity, but the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) remains the poor (and largely forgotten) sibling to the headline-grabbing climate-change convention (UNFCCC). Delegates to CBD talks in Nairobi this week and next are looking at schemes designed to change that, in part by embedding more biodiversity values in the global carbon market.

Common sense would seem to dictate that land generating the greatest environmental good should also command the highest price in the ecosystem marketplace, and that one way to do that might be to let people stack different ecosystem values on the same patch of land.  In the real world, however, such schemes are proving difficult to construct – as mitigation bankers are learning at this week's National Mitigation & Ecosystem Banking Conference in Austin, Texas.

Nature is comprised of interlocking ecosystems, but efforts to preserve nature often fail because they focus on isolated pet problems.  A project launched by Defenders of Wildlife hopes to fix that by helping tens of thousands of conservation projects identify their unique place in the North American tapestry of conservation.