Ecosystem Marketplace1 has just released State of Biodiversity Markets Report: Offset and Compensation Programs Worldwide (PDF). It's a very interesting look at how markets worldwide are being used to enhance biodiversity conservation. The report identifies 39 active projects around the world and 25 in development, including 14 active programs and 5 under development in North America. Each offset program includes many sites at which offsets are being implemented.
The global annual market size is at least $1.8-2.9 billion and covers at least 86,000 hectares of land, but the totals may be much larger. Many programs did not provide enough details to estimate their impact.
In the grand scheme of things $3 billion isn't a lot. The federal government has an annual budget almost 1000 times that large, but $3 billion is still a lot of money. It's good to see that people are beginning to recognize some of the values that biodiversity provides, and recognizing it with their wallets.
1Here's how Ecosystem Market place describes itself:
The Ecosystem Marketplace, a project of Forest Trends, is a leading source of news, data, and analytics on markets and payments for ecosystem services (such as water quality, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity). We believe that by making accessible information on policy, finance, regulation, science, business, and other market-relevant factors, markets for ecosystem services will one day become a fundamental part of our economic system, helping give value to environmental services that, for too long, have been taken for granted. In providing free reliable market information, we hope not only to facilitate transactions (thereby lowering transaction costs), but also to catalyze new thinking, spur the development of new markets and the infrastructure that supports them, and achieve effective and equitable nature conservation.
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