Global spending on nature conservation is currently estimated at around US$50 billion per year. Most of this is public money, yet even this is far from sufficient to maintain biodiversity and the ecosystem services upon which our economies, livelihoods and well-being depend. For this reason, many governments are using payments for ecosystem services (PES) and related market-based instruments to encourage the private sector to do more to protect the environment.
IUCN, as a neutral forum for objectively-based consensus seeking, is facing an ever-increasing demand to conduct independent scientific reviews of controversial development projects. As IUCN gains experience in conducting such processes, it is important to document which approaches lead to success and which ones cause problems, and to draw all these lessons into a more established methodology.
