Making Ecosystems Work for the Poor by Janet Ranganathan and Economic Valuation of Ecosystem Services by Anantha Kumar Duraiappah

1. Making Ecosystems Work for the Poor
Underlying the global degradation of ecosystem services is the fact that people fail to make the connection between healthy ecosystems and the attainment of their development goals.

To bridge this gap, the World Resources Institute (WRI) has launched the Mainstreaming Ecosystem Services Initiative, a portfolio of projects that seeks to reduce ecosystem degradation by helping governments, businesses, and multilateral development banks integrate ecosystem service considerations into development decisions.

About Janet Ranganathan
Janet Ranganathan is the Director of WRI´s People and Ecosystems Program. Janet works with business, government and other stakeholders to catalyze changes in the way ecosystems are managed.

She has also directed WRI´s Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative, as well as WRI´s Learning and leading by doing and SafeClimate.net projects.

Prior to joining WRI she worked on business and environmental issues in the U.K. both as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire and with the Department of Environment and Hertfordshire Waste Regulatory Authority.

2. Economic Valuation of Ecosystem Services
One of the primary reasons for the loss in ecosystem services is because their full values are not considered in decision making processes.

The MA fell short of providing convincing economic values of ecosystem services and in particular the regulating and cultural services. The ESE unit at UNEP intends to bridge this gap by consolidating the economic valuation work done to date at UNEP and to design a targeted program of work to build the knowledge and data base on the economic valuation of ecosystem services at various scales.

About Anantha Duraiappah
Anantha Duraiappah leads the work on economic valuation of ecosystem services and the design of payments for ecosystem services with special emphasis on the distributive impacts.

Anantha was one of the Coordinating Lead authors of the Human well-being chapter in the 2003 MA publication, “Ecosystem Services and Human Well-being". He was also the Co-Chair of the MA Biodiversity Synthesis Working group.

He has a Ph.D in mathematical and computational economics from the University of Texas at Austin.