Portland Katoomba
June 7–9, 2006
Making the Priceless Valuable: Jumpstarting Environmental Markets
A conference hosted by The Katoomba Group, Forest Trends and Ecotrust.
The Pacific Northwest is increasingly ripe for a regional conference to further spur and galvanize emerging efforts to form conservation banks, carbon markets, water quality trading schemes, and other attempts to improve environmental conditions through market mechanisms.
The Pacific Northwest has always been at the forefront of work on environmental markets. Join us and you will hear some of the best speakers, talking about some of the most interesting examples in the use of environmental markets from around the world and the Pacific Northwest. At the end of this conference you will emerge with an understanding of how environmental markets work and how you can be a part of this exciting global development.
While the focus will be on the Pacific Northwest, examples and speakers will be drawn from international and national initiatives and the conference will be highly relevant to participants from all regions interested in developing and enhancing ecosystem service markets.The first day of the conference will be a series of plenary sessions on forest carbon, biodiversity, and watershed payments.The second day will be composed of technical workshops on developing specific markets and instruments. The conference is the first regional expression of The Katoomba Group, an international working group composed of leading experts from forest and energy industries, research institutions, the financial world, and environmental NGOs, all dedicated to facilitating strategic partnerships that can launch green forest products in the marketplace.
The group met for the first time in Katoomba, Australia 1999, and has held subsequent meetings in England, British Columbia, Switzerland,Thailand, Uganda, Brazil, and Japan. This will be the first gathering of the Katoomba Group in the United States.
