Deep in the Amazon, scientists are hard at work. They’re not busy cataloguing fungi subspecies or analysing the healing properties of tropical flora, and their findings are more likely to be published in Business Week than National Geographic.

Occupying their attentions is how to turn tropical forests into money. More precisely, how to place a value on trees that makes them worth more standing than felled for timber.

In the Juma reserve, in Brazil’s Amazonas state, business-minded conservationists have struck on what they think is a solution. The idea: calculate how many trees are in danger of being deforested, determine the value of the forest as timber or agricultural land, and develop a financial instrument to match or exceed that value.

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