Many of our readers have, like us, been anxiously watching the recent meeting of the Conference of the Parties/Meeting of the Parties (or COP/MOP) to the Framework Convention on Climate Change that took place recently in Montreal. To give you a quick and comprehensive idea of what happened at this meeting, we've decided to send out this special edition of the Ecosystem Marketplace newsletter that provides easy access to our coverage of the event. We hope you find it useful.

In essence, what you will find in these stories is a mixed message. While the meeting in Montreal has been hailed as a watershed event, one with fundamental repercussions on the global carbon market, there are those who believe that the meeting was a success only insofar as it was not a major failure. In other words, the meeting's results could have been much worse, they could have been downright disastrous. After all, at stake in Montreal was the future of the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012. Had no agreement been made on this future, carbon markets everywhere would have lost confidence in the demand for carbon beyond 2012, the price of carbon would have almost certainly fallen, and pundits would have openly wondered whether carbon trading even had a future.

Thankfully, such a fate was averted in Montreal. So, a skeptic could argue, it is only in comparison to this worst-case scenario that the meeting in Montreal was successful.

And yet, such skepticism would not be entirely right. As our current feature explains (see Momentum from Montreal), there was some real and positive movement in Montreal. Not only did the meeting provide necessary confidence to the carbon markets, it also opened the door for the participation of developing countries in future agreements, made some efforts to bring the US and Australia back into the climate change fold, channeled new funds to a chronically under-funded CDM registration process, and set in motion a process whereby avoided deforestation could be included in tomorrow's carbon markets (thereby beginning to address the source of nearly 25% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions).

So is the glass half full, half empty, or somewhere else altogether? Clearly an averted disaster is good news. So is the news that carbon markets not only have a future, but can look forward to one that is considerably strengthened. Likewise, it is good news that avoided deforestation and the participation of most of the world's people (i.e. those in developing countries) are now being discussed. So we are, on the whole, optimistic. But don't take our word for it: check out our coverage of the meeting and see what some major news outlets are saying and make up your own mind. Was there real progress in Montreal? Did we take two steps forward and one step back, or vice-versa?

Ricardo Bayon
Amanda Hawn
Adam Davis
Michael Jenkins