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Environment

Must we make a choice between helping the poor and preserving the environment? - 20 July
Schemes that promote payments for ecosystem services (PES) should, in theory, reduce poverty while preserving the environment by rewarding the rural poor for acting as guardians of the ecosystem. Most PES schemes even list poverty reduction as an explicit goal ; but will too much emphasis on helping the poor detract from the environmental benefits? Ecosystem Marketplace summarizes key research. - Ecosystem Marketplace website
Keyphrases :
National PES program. Costa Rica
Payment for Hydrological Environmental Services (PSAH) Program. Mexico
Working for Water (WfW) Program. South Africa

Miscellaneous

Thinkers meet to plot the future - 21 July
Leading thinkers in technology, design and science are gathering in Oxford to share their ideas about the future. TED Global (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is the European cousin of an already established top US event. The invitation-only conferences are dedicated to "ideas worth spreading" and have seen talks by former US presidents and Nobel Laureates. The invited speakers, who are each given 18 minutes in front of the audience, are drawn from an eclectic backgrounds. This year's line up includes an aphorist, a wireless electrician, an underworld investigator and a high-altitude archaeologist. Professor Jonathan Zittrain, a cyber-lawyer at Harvard University, is also one of this year's presenters. His theme is "ways to tackle problems that do not rely heavily on governments or markets". "Something I will talk about is how the internet deals with trouble; and by internet I mean the actual fabric of the internet. - BBC News website

See : http://conferences.ted.com/TEDGlobal2009/program/guide.php

InfoUpdate : an Information Service supplied by the KwaZulu-Natal Law Society